


tiramisu

by ruruka



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Teacher-Student Relationship, but not in a gross way., like toffee. but spicier.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-15 08:58:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 29,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16930281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: sometimes you're gaga for a goddamned renegade.





	1. Chapter 1

Naegi Makoto isn’t the brightest.

And he thinks so, too, reminds himself on a vinyl scratch loop each time he rises from bed eleven sleepy minutes after his alarm’s told him to, each time he stuffs his feet into untied converse and trips his stomach hard against the desk after stepping on a lace two moments later; each time he coughs and sputters and stiffens his spine back righted in time to throw himself out his dorm room door and ten thousand miles across campus to the lecture hall he’s yet to ever enter, thanks his gods for the zip up hoodie tucked up over his tee shirt so no one’ll notice the darkness beneath either arm. And he thinks so, too, all the loop over through the morning until he steps across the threshold of the room point six seconds before the clock would call him late. He _breathes-_ perhaps he’s quite actually a mindblowing limbquaking genius.

“Sit.”

Shoulders pinch him inward, glances a frenzied whip for the side wall where the bite has originated. Just as soon as he’s looked, he wishes his eyes could just perhaps melt out of his skull. They very well may, should he take that stare any second further. Rather does he nod, like a good little dictionary grade passive, slink off to find a seat among the few already taken. That tips him to think he’s not the only of unprompt feet this morning, wherein the new semester’s just wound back up today and everyone’s reeling still from late summer nights (and just maybe he’d woken at ten:forty-one for the rationale that he’s been up til sunrise with video games and snack cakes for the past two months at home). It matters null now, as he’s wobbling up the middle row steps to spot eyes that do not touch him but have in softness so many times before.

“I didn’t know you had this class too,” he murmurs in a place of himself beside her, bag cascading from shoulder to floor. Kirigiri offers no response outside nudging one of the two styrofoam cups on her desk his way.

Over its rim, he surveys the class. It’s not so much a hall as it appears more a high school classroom, not like the grand echoing realms of trigonometry and ecology. Windows sprinkle light all down one side of it. Aside from them the pair perched toward the back row, two others sit, one ratty ragdoll of a girl hunched over in the front row, another guy leant backward in his seat, lanky and tall and if Naegi squints he can notice the resting of his eyelids closed and short up downs of chest. Another video games and snack cakes kind of man.

The very antithesis of it stands suddenly at the room’s front, a goliath once ripped away from the hard oak desk. He’s all legs, broad shoulders, young taut face- but he digresses, it’s a college course not a runway show. Standing, the professor, same one who so recently turned his ears scarlet with command, drops a stack of books to the desk top, makes the sleeping goon in the middle row _snurk_ back to life and glance around. The professor’s stare thins toward him from behind lenses he next adjusts, though says only to them all, “This is Law and Literature.”

Naegi trembles beneath his clipped tone, harsh enough to crush ice or gravel or throats underneath an oxford heel. He glances to his right for whatever support can be mustered from Kirigiri’s presence there. She sips her coffee, and continues staring straight. His morale balks.

“Backward,” he commands curtly as he drops four books to the front row girl’s table. Naegi watches her glance up at the shadow cast over her by his imperial stance, watches her shudder not in fear as he but delight that shivers all down her bony spine. “Y-Yes, sir,” answers out, and lightspeed casts the books toward the middle man’s chest. He coughs in a catch of them, says in a slow, lethargic mumble, “Hey, chill out, I coulda broken a rib.” The remaining two books are passed over his mountain of hair, dropped to Naegi’s hands just in time for them to decide upon a slip up and tumble to the floor at his feet. “Whoops,” comes with a glance backward from him, “Sorry, little dude.”

Burning, Naegi ducks from his seat to collect them, divvys between he and his seat partner who makes no move to acknowledge him. He swallows, breathes out the sweat from his lungs.

Up front, no glare chastises him as he expects, only finds the instructor placed back behind his desk again skimming through laminated sheets. His chin lifts to cast a look upon them all, opens his mouth with a pop to address. “I don’t suspect any of you are competent enough to purchase your own textbooks in time to work with my course, so I’ve provided them for you. You will be responsible for keeping them and whichever novel we are examining at the time in pristine condition, as well bringing them with you to class every-“

“Knock knock, hi. Sorry, I _completely_ screwed up which hall this class is in.” From the doorway bounds a flushed looking girl in running shorts and a messy brunette bun, clutching onto a bagged pastry in one hand whilst the other carries a pencil case of puppy face print. “I had to sprint all the way from the North end to here. But it’s only the first day, so it’s okay, right? Oh, hi, Kyouko!”

She’s waving the pastry bag now in greeting, one which Kirigiri does not strain herself away from her stiff frontward staring to accept. The girl hasn’t the time to be disappointed, only makes her way to walk toward them both but halts after one step to the cut of a voice.

“What is your name?”

“Hm?” She turns back, nods once. “I’m Asahina Aoi. This is Law and Lit, right?”

The professor gleans ire up into a glower. He straightens even farther than his faultless posture to burn down upon her short muscular frame.

“You know both your own name and that of this course. So you haven’t suffered major brain damage, or injury of any kind that would have impeded your ability to be at my class on time, nor cause you to interrupt my lecture with your little show.” His arms rest folded. She peers at him in a confused mirror of the puppydogs on her pencil case.

“Jeez, sorry for interrupting,” and that confusion turns to melting irritation, more so once he quips, “As you should be. Greatly. With more sincerity than you’ve managed to cough up here.”

Asahina Aoi blinks at him, once, twice, shoulders better her backpack and aims herself back toward the door. “God, you’re a douche. I’ll take Creative Writing instead.”

They watch her retreat back out for the hallway again, leaving a trail of hot flame flickering up into their professor’s eyes.

“And anyone else who decides to treat my class like a nursery school lesson can join her. You should know fully well that I will not ever tolerate idiotic behavior.” Though the room bears no space for echo, Naegi finds it isn’t needed, and he’s enough all his own to build a cacophony. Breathing one final note, he straightens his coat at the bottom, and sits roughly back to his seat behind the hard oak desk. “Open your textbooks to page eleven.”

Stiffly, Naegi moves to follow command, slipping a whisper off to his right for Kirigiri alone to swallow, “...Maybe I’ll take Creative Writing, too.”

For themselves alone to swallow, Kirigiri’s mouth peels into the finest mottled smirk.

It’s died along with the period after half past noon’s come along, books shuffled to bags and eyes not once daring a meet toward the front of the room. The lazy one in the middle row (who’d introduced himself as Hagakure, twenty six, who’s just here for the credits once prompted for a name) staggers off alone for the doorway, tugging from one of a million pockets a half pack of Marlboros on his way out; the scraggly girl up front (who’d shot her hand up high at every last question asked all period, despite hardly ever knowing the correct answer though drooling all the same to be told she’s hideously wrong, and who’d called herself Fukawa Touko just to ensure their professor knew it without having been prompted for a name) stays behind to attempt conversation with the instructor behind his desk, very so clearly absorbed by the paperwork in his hands rather than her spewing words. Naegi ducks his head and continues on past them in a jolted startle once that paperwork loses its stare a half second flash to land upon himself instead. Kirigiri trails behind him, adjusting the knit lay of her beret on her hair as they walk out into the autumn colors.

“Jeez, that guy was... _intense,”_ Naegi puts it nicely, and must laugh a touch to avoid a flood at the eyes for stress release. Stealing a glance behind, he notes the finger at her chin, the tilt to it, the flat kept, “Fascinating.”

“Uh…” Naegi wavers a nerved smile again. “Sure, you could put it that way.”

Breeze clips their ankles. They part ways at the fork betwixt the girls’ and boys’ dorm wings, leaving him to tramp along the brick path all the way to his building’s front entry, up the stairs, up the stairs, until he’s winded in slipping his key into the knob. Fine. Pink cold trims his nose tip, swaps for flush of the inside heat once it captures him enough to ditch his jacket.

He tosses it atop the left bed before making to sink into his own, left still in a hurricane frenzy from whipping up this morning (though no different than the _every_ morning he follows the same). His progress is hindered by a startle in his heart once the coat wiggles with the mound stirring beneath it. “Fuck are you doing to me, dude?”

“Oh!” His head tilts alongside a blink. “I didn’t know you were here, Kuwata.” Cautious, he plucks his belongings back to throw on his own bed. “Sorry.”

“‘Course I’m here.” He shifts enough to sit straight, chest bare and hair wild with sleep. “I don’t sign up for morning classes. What am I, an animal?”

“It’s...almost one.”

“My point exactly.” Kuwata sweeps himself to legs hanging off his bed, blanket slung to nude himself to the world where he’s sitting only in boxer shorts and piercing studs, yawns and stretches the sinew of his arms high over the head. Muted scarlet glows along his body from the lava lamp sitting on the table beside him. “Where’ve you been, then, eh?” A finger sticks up toward him.

Weightless, Naegi places himself to his own bed to begin rifling through the mess of papers in his bag. “I had a lit course. It seems okay, Kirigiri’s there, at least. ...The teacher is just kinda terrifying.”

“Hah, that bad? Worse than Yukizome?”

Though he stiffens to recall, Naegi nods one hard bob. “Worse. At least Yukizome was only scary when she got mad. I don’t think this guy knows how to _not_ be mad. And he already assigned us a paper.” He tips backward by the neck, groaning within his throat.

“Damn,” grunts Kuwata, tugging the closet door of the opposite side opened, scanning for the least dirtied outfit to stuff himself into. “Let me stay clear of any of his classes then. What’s his name?”

“Uh.” His limbs all choose to freeze. Lips twisted to a purse, he... _thinks_. “Um...I dunno.”

Jeans pull up his thighs. “You don’t know? Hell, Naegs, you just spent a whole block with him. You good?”

He breathes into collecting himself, watching bright synthetic orange poke up from the collar of a tee and produce his roommate in full form anew. “Well, ah, he’s really tall. Like, _really_ tall. He’s probably not Japanese- but, but he looks it. A little bit. Well, he’s blond, too. Oh- and he wears glasses. Maybe that’s why his eyes look small… He’s got a good face, and he dresses good. He-”

“Alright, alright, don’t need you to get gay over it. Tall blond dude? I’m sure he won’t be too hard to find in the middle of Asia.” Kuwata thumbs his sneaker lips into place on his heels, swings his bag over a shoulder and makes for the doorframe. “I got class at two, but I’m gonna head over to see Maizono. See if she needs help, hah, movin’ into her dorm, if you know what I mean.”

If he didn’t already, the motion of grabbing the air by the hips and thrusting forward into it does the trick. Naegi grimaces in a nod as his roommate exits with a slam of the door, alone with the rush of blush to his head and forest green lava lamp light tickling his skin.

He breathes, soft through the nose, turns to the textbook pulled from his bag just to stare at it a moment, flip the cover opened, drop it back, flip, drop. It is he who next follows, drops flat to his back atop rumpled sheets and kills the light with an arm tossed over the eyes.

Long morning.


	2. Chapter 2

One week post, he’s up at ten:twenty, in his seat by ten:fifty-four, cowering with fear by eleven:oh:two.

(But at least he’s on time).

“-and I’m sure not one of you could actually comprehend the chapter, if my impressions of you all last class are any indication of your merit as students-”

“Nh-! P-Professor Togami, sir, I-I held onto every word!” stammers the girl at the front. Naegi peers at her, the way she knocks her spine back against her wood seat to perfect her posture in time to address their professor (whose name he now knows, score). Where she’d been shuffling around her bag, papers spilling up from the unflapped top, he can see from rows away, her fingers quiver around a stapled stack to proffer his way and say, “I analyzed it _deeply!_ in my paper...”

Togami, stood straight locked before her desk, stares to the offering a cutting while. He plucks it from her, then, which makes her squeal at the mere inches sundering them. His eyes run across it after a step backward. Then roll. Hard. And he scoffs, “From how flat and repetitive your thesis reads, I can only imagine what the next three uninspiring pages have in store.” The pages slap back down to her table top, leaving his searing gaze upon hers of shock. “You’d have been better off not even doing the assignment, like the grape-brained derelict behind you.”

Hagakure perks up at the attention flitting his way so suddenly. “Hey, how’d you know I didn’t do it? Do you got psychic powers too, boss?”

The _look_ he receives would euthanize any other. When it switches victims, it very nearly does. “You,” and he needn’t nod nor point- Naegi _knows_ he’s the target beneath those twenty four carat daggers. “Bring me your paper. Let me get all of the disappointment out of the way early today.”

He tries, desperate, not to let his panic show, he really does, but it’s simply that he can either focus on keeping his expression staid or keeping his bladder from running loose, and he’d rather not approach his professor with a dark stain around his jean crotch; so, perhaps his mouth wobbles just the slightest, but he offers one hard nod, glances to Kirigiri sans reciprocation and pushes himself up to walk down the three center steps. Directly beside him, Naegi feels like a county fair fish in a child’s eager, flailing hand, and he tips forward to gift the paper outward, fresh printed the night prior after remembering its due date and scrambling for the campus resource center. He’s unsure whether to stay or retreat back to his desk, though Togami pays him no mind after grasping his work and leering lasers down upon it.

The clearing of his throat makes Naegi’s ears bleed. “Naegi Makoto, Law and Literature, 9 September. Ah, last night. Good to see you’re prompt.” He flinches, and Togami continues reading, “The first chapter of the textbook was very interesting. It gave me a different insight on how people think of the law and of literature. I think that both law, and literature, are very interesting, because they both give people a reason to continue on and live in a better more creative future.” One arm folded, the other clutching the paper slaps it down to one thigh. Subtle, inching, Togami tilts his jaw to meet their eyes, exhaling sundried droll through his nose.

“If that’s how you plan on eking your way through this course, I have no further interest in allowing you to stay on my roster.” The paper passes back to its owner at the chest, drawn away again with, “Sit back down.”

Naegi does so with a hang of his head, slips himself as small as can be to his seat, shifts his flushed face forward. He’d thought it was pretty well done for a last minute paper. Better than most of his high school ones.

Kirigiri keeps her gaze trained on the professor.

Said professor- he moves in clips, stark clacks of dress shoes until he’s up beside his own desk, perching himself up on it like a canary, one leg folded over the other, knuckles clutching the wood edge. “I don’t see any value in teaching this course if none of you will take it seriously. I want to waste as much of your time as you’ve all wasted of mine.”

His shoulders draw back once he folds his arms, piercing them all in silence enough to hear breaths at five octaves. Fukawa Touko points her mousy face to her lap, peeling nervously at the ringlets of her braids, while Hagakure balances a pen above his top lip. Naegi glances left, right, catching the glint in Kirigiri’s eye who, twenty two minutes into the jarring silence, at last lifts her hand to say, “Professor, I’d like to ask you a question.”

From the front, his jawline tilts to collect window sunlight, tilts to better peer down upon her like the dust she must be. “I suppose. Go ahead.”

Lowering gloves to table top lacquer, she nods. “What made you want to teach?”

That piques not only Togami’s interest but that of the whole class as well; Hagakure moves his arms from crossed behind his head to point one forward. “Yeah, eh, you look like a fifteen year old! There’s no way you have your teacher license already. That’s okay, though, I’m not a snitch.”

Togami clicks his teeth at him. “Twenty one years ago, the world blossomed with the greatest glory known to man, and your questioning of my authority dulls it null. I’m more than qualified. I earned in one year more degrees than you could spend the rest of your life groveling for.”

“Huh? Twenty one..?” Naegi isn’t sure where the gusto to speak has come from, though his lips move to surprise from four corners all the same. “Uh...are-are you even allowed to be a college professor if you’re that young?”

A deadpan stare greets him across the rows of empty seats. “I’m Togami Byakuya.” Light gleams across his lenses. “Remember that name. As for the original question at hand, I can only say it is my duty to better the lackluster sheen of this nation’s youth.”

Naegi thinks categorizing a class half older than oneself as _youth_ rings a bit in narcissism, but has no time to deter the colloquy at hand from trailing onward. And perilously. “It isn’t only to coerce your own ideas onto anyone who will listen- because they’re forced to, for the credits? I’d say that stems as well from your lack of attention as a child, though I suppose that wouldn’t be appropriate of me. Perhaps you subconsciously hope to make up for that missing role model in your life by ensuring no one else suffers the same fate, therefore filling in that position for anyone who comes by and is missing their own, too. Though, that in turn can fade easily into manipulation, but I’m not sure yet whether or not you would have thought that far ahead.” Chin in hand, she nods once, looks straight toward him. “I think it’s mainly the attention piece.”

Naegi gawks.

Togami gawks.

Fukawa flings herself from her seat and yells with a training point, “D-Don’t you _dare_ insult my professor’s intelligence like that, disrespectful w-w- _wench!_ ”

Beyond her low growling, the room sits in silence again. Kirigiri brushes the hair from one shoulder.

Still paused clean, VHS static and all, Togami at last bids his jaw taut again. He bounds from his seat atop his desk to round the corner of it, stuffing a satchel filled back with paperwork, top drawer slamming with a harrowing echo. Red up the flesh, he addresses the class in a sharp glare. “Rewrite your papers for next class,” he demands, and grips his bag’s handle in a jaunt for the classroom door.

The four of them bob along cold saltwater waves. Fukawa collects herself finally to bundle her papers and books back into her bag and sling it over her head, griping the whole way about dirty bitches and their dirty mouths. Hagakure’s long since nodded off. Naegi glances to him, then ever slow drags it up to the one seated beside him.

“...I haven’t heard you talk that much in...a _while_.” Blinking away the golf ball roundness, he settles on laughing just a touch. His shoulders melt their stiffness away enough to stand once she does so first. Out on the sun glistened asphalt, he ventures, “Don’t...Don’t you think that was a little mean..?”

Where his mouth pulls back into a cringe, hers falls flat, tight. She sniffs once, admires the foliage as they approach the center commons fountain between the two dorms. “Experiments come before conclusions.”

They part, with such little end, tucking a pink knuckled hand into one hoodie pocket as he makes his way toward his dormitory. Half way through, he’s jangled through the pocket enough to feel at least two hundred yen crumpled up, and contemplates exchanging that inside the campus coffee shop- he’s dreadfully lacking caffeine, after such a class each week. He glances to it, through the windows on the front, sees a curvy little strawberry blonde working the cash register, and decides that’s enough relief to step inside. It’ll be nice to slip back into routine again- and he’s dangerously craving a muffin.

And that’s all he can smell on his entrance inside, makes his mouth drip beneath the tongue as he takes a spot in line. The cute cashier forms two tiny hearts with each forefinger and thumb pad, sending the latest customer off with her love and a bagged scone. Naegi shifts into comfort, smiling the mildest, until his survey around trims it clean off.

It isn’t so bad to give his place in line up to the guy behind him, and he’s got a mission in mind- one upon which he skutters off to a side table made for two but housing one, one and her spider-like fingers typing along the faded letters of her keyboard while hunched over in one secluded corner. “...Hey, you’re Fukawa, right?” he says, and she jumps, instantly clutching to her chest the computer screen and glaring up toward him as if she were a trapped rodent and he the lit wick.

“GH-! W-What do you want from me? Did someone dare you to come talk to me?! G-Get lost!”

Flush clouds Naegi’s cheekbones, glancing away from her with all mustered gall stuffed into one hand. That hand travels to touch behind his hair, stumbling over _ahs_ and _ums_ until he manages, “N...No! Nobody dared me. I just...saw you over here, and wanted to say hi.”

Fukawa bares her teeth at him, though something behind those narrowed gray eyes reads more fear than fight. “You’ve-You’ve said it already, now get away from me b-before I call campus security.” From head to toe, she trembles, then explodes, dropping the computer back to the table to point at him. “That’s what I should have d-done as soon as your mail order whore opened her mouth in class today and disgraced my f-future groom!”

“Uhh…” Naegi blushes darker. “...Kirigiri? Um, actually, I wanted to ask you about that…” When he drops his arm to rest at a side, she flinches into grasping either long corded braid, eyes wide enough to fill her lenses despite their slow slip down her nose. He takes one step backward, for both of their sakes. “...Are you and Professor Togami, like, friends? Do you know him outside class?”

“ _Idiot_ ,” she spews, gnawing the tip of one thumb. “He’s-He’s the love of my life. I won’t have your filthy little yaoi hands interfering with that!” Her head lolls to one side, then, no time for him to offer input before she’s clutching herself in a hug that tightens with every drooling, lust-faced word. “Haah...but who could blame you for w-wanting him… Have you heard the way he lectures? What I wouldn’t _give_ to be the mare beneath his riding crop…!”

The several peculiar glances the outburst earns pass him blindly by, too captivated within his slack Honda tire of a mouth and eyebrows that feign enough interest to keep her placated. Naegi swallows, composes himself, whips around the other way and breathes in cool fall air again.

Answers obtained: zero. Images he won’t be able to get out of his head tonight: many.

He’ll get his muffin another day.


	3. Chapter 3

“Pass your papers forward. I’ll grade them while you read chapters two and three.”

Eleven AM sharp. Naegi’s still groggy in his oh-shit-it’s-ten-forty-five-pajamas-underneath-the-coat-and-jeans look, hair fluffy and uncombed atop his head, lips twirling around a yawn as he hands his latest assignment forward. Four (yes, four, a hat tipped for Hagakure, he thinks, even if it’s only half a page) collect together at the front and lift sweetly up from Fukawa to Togami’s waiting hand to snatch them away. Amid peeling his textbook out of his bag, a peripheral catches the sifting through of the pile, heart in the throat in anticipation of his own being selected out. Rather, he must divide the anxiety out for their professor advancing toward them, up the three steps and an inch from his very seat. Naegi can smell his cologne. Perhaps his ears tinge pink.

Though, his initial frets solve themselves when instead the claw machine grip pulls out the paper of the one aside him, dropped to the desk and a felt tip marker atop that. Beside the printed name _Kirigiri Kyouko, Law and Literature_ circles a bleeding scarlet 0/100.

“Thank you, professor,” Kirigiri says as she accepts it back to her. Her untouched tone ignites new rage within him, kept contained at the core; the marker is capped, and he turns back to sit at his desk and peruse through the rest. Naegi freezes, fingers wrapped round book edges, though has his terror again alleviated by a spin around from the seat ahead of him.

“Psst, Naegichi, I lost my textbook,” Hagakure speaks at hardly a hushed volume. “Can I borrow yours today?”

He sits in _oh_ a moment before breaking out a nod, hands the book forward. “...Sure. I can share with Kirigiri.”

Hagakure tosses a finger gun lazily over his head while turning back to open the borrowed literature, Naegi himself twisting inward, mouth open to speak but interrupted by the slide of her book toward the middle of them. He smiles, glancing down to it and panicking only faintly to see she’s already three pages in.

By the time she flips to chapter three, he understands roughly six percent of what the previous one attempted to say to him, bobbing his knee beneath the desk as he follows along. It’s another ten minutes before the book shuts in on itself, before Hagakure’s snoring in front of them, before Fukawa’s resting her chin on two folded hands to eye up the instructor’s rise toward the blackboard.

“I expect I’ve given more than enough time to finish.” Arms folded, Togami peers for prey in the sparse crowd, deducing which of it he’d _least_ like to listen to, Naegi imagines. He hopes he’s loathed just as much as the two girls, because whatever question going to be asked about the reading will sink into his stomach like cement at sea. Again, he finds himself saved when two palms clap starkly together. “Oi, degenerate. Wake up and summarize your thoughts on this section’s relation to political philosophy.”

Hagakure conjures the will to snap his neck upward and accept the question with vague interest. “Eh...hah? Well, there sure were a lot of numbers and symbols I di’nt understand in there... probably meant something good!”

A honey blond brow quirks up. “What in the hell are you on about?”

“Huh, see,” sniffs Hagakure, looking down to the book splayed out on his table. “Look once more at the formula which expresses the area of a triangle in terms of two sides and the sine of the included angle. We already know that there are three of these formulas. Each of them is obtained from the others by cy... _cyclic_ substitutions of-”

Mid-sentence, he cuts out by way of the textbook cover slapping forward atop its innards. The front cover blares a flat green up to Togami, who reads the font, “Trigonometry.” His glasses nudge up the bridge of his nose. “If your hair didn’t stink so badly, I’d slap you upside the skull.”

“Let me answer instead, Professor Byakuya!” Fukawa’s arm shoots high up. “I-I can actually read words more than two syllables, and my h-hair doesn’t stink, ehehe-”

“Yes it does. Naegi, tell me about what you read.”

The transition between realizing he’d sleepily slung the wrong textbook in his bag this morning (and gotten away with it- the first luck he’s had all his life, closely) and being hooked up into the sudden spotlight leaves him reeling. “Uh...um...th-the-”

“Unless, of course, you’d all rather write me another paper on it instead of holding an intelligent discussion-”

“The views expressed by Sakurai h-highlight how different we as normal citizens see works of l-literature in their most raw form as compared to-!”

“Be _quiet_ , Fukawa.” She slaps two palms to her spit-wet mouth, collapsing back in her seat as her eyes do roll backwards. Togami pays her no mind. “Tell me, Naegi. What did you think of the chapters? It isn’t a hard question. Hagakure had an answer for me, and he can hardly spell his own name.”

The example rests backward in his seat, arms folded and legs propped up on the desk to aid his comfort of repose. Togami kicks the leg of his table. He jolts up with a snort and spills, “I swear, I didn’t kiss your dad-! Oh, huh? Professor Togamichi, you’re in this dream, too?”

“I-It’s a nightmare if _you’re_ in it,” Fukawa hisses from her seat, though a sharp snap of a look over Togami’s shoulder reminds her to clap her hands back over silence.

The teacher swivels back with a sigh. “...If you have nothing to say, Naegi, then I’ll just have to-”

“The-! The findings of Doctor, um S-Sakurai? were really, um...intelligent,” he asserts, knee jouncing still underneath him. He sweats through his pajama shirt. “...It’s really important to remember that there’s other people besides yourself in the world, and everybody sees things differently, but that doesn’t mean anybody is more or less smart than anybody else. It just means we’re all...different.”

Togami’s lips purse forward, and to Naegi’s surprise, delight, relief, he nods. “An arguable point. Might I contest you, then, what does that mean to you?”

“To me? Well...uh.” A half glance to the right soothes him enough to go on, “It’s like, there’s only a few people in this room alone, yet none of us are the same, you know? So just think about that if you consider how many people are in Japan, or-or the whole world, and there’s no two people who see everything the exact same way. It’s...cool. Everybody’s unique, that’s what makes the world keep going.”

Satisfied, he drops a nodding, which Togami picks up to further, “Is it not differences that spark tragedies, world wars, crime, imprisonment? Were everyone the same, would the world not be much kinder?”

“Didn’t work well for Germany,” murmurs Kirigiri, though Naegi can only shake his head and debate back, “Well, maybe you could think that way, but I don’t. There’s no way to do it, anyway, right? ‘Cause even when children are raised by the exact same parents the exact same way, they still turn out different. Like me and my sister. We’re way different. She sucks.” He laughs alongside a gleaming grin just to ensure the world he speaks in jest for that, yet his opponent keeps a steady expression of no partisanship. “So, start cloning. Replace the population with seven point seven billion of me.”

Behind him, a cherry moan falls muffled by palms. Togami stays the same stiff adversary as ever. Naegi peers at his seven heads. “Cloning? I don’t think that was in the textbook…”

“No, but it’s quite fun to watch you run yourself ragged on your wheel. Shall I hook a water bottle to your cage? You seem worn out.”

“Uh...no, thanks.” Naegi loses the posture distracted determination had gifted him, slumping forward in his seat and facing away from the dropped call. He _could_ be more defeated, but he wouldn’t ever like to taste it.

Togami applies his authority to the situation in no time at all. “Use the rest of the period to take notes on what you’ve studied thus far. Test in two weeks.”

With that, independent study progresses, Naegi shifting himself enough to allow Hagakure’s entrance and seat behind to read along with their textbook. His trigonometry book thunks back within his bag. Togami pores over paperwork at his desk. Naegi exhales dead weight into the air.

Half a page of ink rolls down Kirigiri’s notebook whilst class nears its end, whereas his own coasts a line or two before drawling off into scribbles. The table makes an imprint on Hagakure’s forehead as he hangs his arms below it to fidget with his shoelaces.

Thirty of the next o’clock, they’re liberated, and Naegi cannot imagine a sweeter feeling on his skin. He’s dreaming of blueberry muffin sugar crunching in his jaws by the time he’s hopped down the three short steps, only to be drawn back a bound by the call of his name. He stops himself, offers a double take for the origin. Fukawa hunches past him, bumps his elbow and blames him for it. Hagakure had vanished the second the clock struck time for it, only meagerly tripping over his interlaced sneakers in his burst for the door. Kirigiri stands at that very same door, her scarf of this day tucked neat up top her mouth, stealing one long look for what’s gone on, and disappearing as wind takes smoke.

Naegi blinks. The lecture hall seems much less quaint when left perfectly alone in it.

Despite having called, Togami does not meet his eye. He settles in a while, leaving that sharp _Naegi._ to hang in the air between them. Though, when they at last do connect, in a tap of papers straightened to the desk, in a lick of fire through either iris, Naegi wishes it the same full minute spent in choking wait.

“I want to speak to you about your paper.”

Choking spiral. Turning toward him fully, Naegi nods, daring to approach another step closer. Togami flips to the second stapled sheet of aforementioned assignment, glancing tightlipped to it in more quiet. Even from a seat, Naegi feels towered over.

“Ah...was it that bad?” Sweat sweat more sweat. His head tips to one side- maybe if he plays the dumb puppy type, it’ll work out better for him. “Sorry.”

Togami, rather, waves his fingers forth to allow, “The first was a train wreck. But the revision...a car wreck.” _Uh...thank you?_ Naegi feels his shoulders stiffen. Togami swivels the slightest in his chair. “I can tell that you worked hard to do it better the second time. Work ethic can at most times impress me more than the quality of production.”

Clicking together the pieces in his mind, he decides upon accepting it to live as a compliment on his character, which sings the tune of sunshine in his ears. God’s own pet tiger has sprinkled praise upon his work, despite how slender, despite the backhand that follows, “I say this only to keep you from wasting my time with any more barely even half-assed papers such as the first one you tried to give me.” As he hands it back, a deep red 75/100 scrawled atop it, his grip refuses to relent even once the other has his own upon it. Togami leans inward, strangling him with a gaze unmerciful. “Do not ever waste my time again, Naegi Makoto.”

Naegi, the rabbit, the fawn, nods his head, and is permitted to take the paper for himself, where it is kept beneath his eyes a soft moment of marvelling. He looks back up again. Togami’s already busied himself with other happenings, cell phone tucked up between cheek and ear as he shuffles through folders.

Naegi, the imp, the fool, takes a blind stab and hopes for the carotid artery. “Thank you so much, Professor…You’re actually...I-I think you’re actually pretty cool. Maybe you could hang out with me and my friends sometime, heh. It wouldn’t be weird, we’re all the same age and everything. H...Heh.”

Just as soon as he’s proffered it, he’s skewered through the middle by silent hurricane pupils. Togami ushers him off with a wave of his hand, turns all the way around to take the awaiting phone call. Behind him now, Naegi nods to himself, blinks away the burn of his entire face and droplets threatening, stiff in every joint to cast himself out into the afternoon’s freedom.

Where he’d learned such temerity, he hasn’t a clue.

He knows assuredly, though, that he’s the holder of a laudable work ethic, and a sudden interest in literature.


	4. Chapter 4

The vending machine in the main campus lobby jumps with every kick.

“Come _on!_ Fuckin’ thief- you think I have enough money to waste it like this?!”

Tuesday mornings always seem the warmest, the tightest, though this one bites beneath fingerless gloves and the knit of his hat. He watches on, side to side to side, in fear of glimpses caught of any other’s breath. Another slam of a palm hits the machine. Naegi winces.

“Eh...K...Kuwata? I think maybe you should give up on it... I don’t want you to get in trouble-”

“The fuck with that! Aren’t you the one always preaching about never giving up and always doing your best?!” He wrests the machine with both hands, shaking it as much as it will leftways, rightways. “Coward ass vending machine… Give me my sweet-potato chips, bitch!”

Pouting, Naegi feels around within the layers of his jacket to find the right pocket and pull his cell phone into view. Ten:twenty-seven. He’s got time, still, if Kuwata would end his battle and follow through with their morning’s plan as intended.

The machine begins to sway precariously to either side. Naegi should have listened to instinct that told him Kuwata Leon was not a morning person.

“Hey, um, if we go now, we’ll have time to stop at the little coffee shop over there before going to the resource center. They sell bags of snacks there, I’ll get you one.” He watches him pummel it around another loud moment. “I’ve got class at eleven, sooo…”

“To hell with this shit,” comes his final cry, and Naegi somehow wishes he’d never intervened once he’s standing there watching the vending machine be wretched from its unfaded rectangle of tile and fall face first against the ground. He’s frozen in mild astonishment, watching further the way Kuwata tips the top end up by one quaking pitcher’s arm to reveal a half hundred prepackaged snacks fallen forward off their hooks, spilling some from the machine’s mouth.

“ _YEEHOO-!_ Naegs, grab some Panda cookies, you eat the hell outta those.”

“Um- I-I don’t think I want to steal anyth-”

“It ain’t stealing, I put ten fuckin’ coins into this thing. We aren’t leaving without our money’s worth.”

“Um...I-I...uh-”

“ _Stop!_ Stay where you are!”

They both know the reverberations far too well to not blanch at the sound. Naegi does not turn to face the voice, rather stays solid as Kuwata trembles his way into twisting free from beneath the caloric wreckage.

“Heeey, Eyebrows, long time no-”

“ _Kuwata LEON!_ I should have known this ruckus would be your doing!” A pen tip points harshly toward his defense of palms risen, swaps next to accuse the accomplice. “You, Naegi, I would not have thought _you_ would be a part of this!”

He lifts a hand to the back of his neck, refusing the bullet point stare. “Good morning, Ishimaru… I-It’s not what it looks like here, a-ah-”

“Vandalizing campus property is against _all_ rules and regulations, Naegi!” The pen slips backward to touch upon his clipboard. Stark ironed white glints off the window pane sun.

Tipping his nose over the clipboard to the pink slips upon it, Kuwata scoffs his side. “Hey, c’mon man, you’re not gonna write us up, are ya? We’re all friends here.”

Abrupt, the pen stops scrawling. “F...Friends?” says Ishimaru and the new light in his eye. He blinks, then, steels himself back into his work. “There are no exceptions for criminals of the law. This will be on both of your records.”

“Psh, why would _I_ ever break the law?” Kuwata waves. “My dad’s a Tokyo police sergeant.”

Again the pen halts, gleaming amber irises pointed up to look at him. “Truly?”

Kuwata hangs his head in a loose nod, going on, “Yep, so I know a lot about the law. I even read the school handbook cover to cover. So I know  _aaall_  about the rules here, especially that one about, uh, the one about vandalizing and-”

“Section 3A, Vandalization or purposeful destruction of school property of any kind will result in direct violation?!” Though he’s recited it so graciously, it comes not with authority but rather bright bright interest.

Another nod, pointing, sharp feigned intrigue. “Yeah, that one. And-And Section 7E, that one knocked my socks off.”

Fist thrown to a side, Ishimaru barks a genuine laugh. “I agree! I cannot imagine losing so many cats at one time!”

“Yeah, yeah!” Kuwata’s mouth wiggles in uncertainty, though keeps strongly his good boy grin. “Hey, how about the one about the- _hah -_ parking in teacher spots?!”

“I do not recall that being in the handbook,” Ishimaru cuffs suddenly, drops the fake mirth from the other’s expression to match them both in sedate air. They stand smart and stiff. Kuwata blinks out the terror of red hands. Then, all at once, the RA dips into bellowing laughter. “Just kidding! I make jokes! Of course I remember Section 13B!”

Collectively the pair of them breathe relief, Naegi finding himself suddenly awake outside the situation enough to backpedal inch by inch away from them both. He slips his skinny body out the lobby doors and into that freezing September morning, checks his phone (ten:forty-four), checks behind him one last time (to see through the glass doors that Kuwata’s got an arm slung over Ishimaru’s quaking shoulders, tears glistening in his eyes from the humor of whatever they’re discussing) before bobbing into a jog for time’s sake. The resource center will have to wait- he can show his roommate how to turn on a computer another day. Right now, he’s got his target set straight in mind. He’ll make it. He has to.

“Naegi!”

 _He’ll make it he has to he’ll make it he has t-_ For gentle heart alone, he cannot bring himself to speed up upon hearing the call, writhes in his own self hatred a moment before whipping around to catch the pace approaching him. “Naegi!” she says again now closer, having sprinted her way from the girls dormitory side over to him with pink cheeks and sparkling eyes. “Thank God I caught you. Do you know where Kuwata is?”

He won’t say he’s disappointed, there’s no time for anything a breathtaking pop princess would want from him, anyhow. “He’s, uh, busy right now, Maizono. Sorry.”

“That jerk,” she grumbles, then picks her irritation away for desperation anew. “I need help, _now!_  Ibuki left the door open, and both my cats got loose at the same time! I’m not even supposed to have them here, if the RA finds out about this they’re gonna get taken away!” Her pout stabs kitchen knives through his spine. “Can you help me find them, _pleeease?”_

Staring, thinking, gawking. His sight shifts between the damsel and the building far off in the horizon awaiting his ass in a seat in the next fifteen.

“I…” he swallows. “...Of course, I’ll help you. Let’s go.”

She bows a brief sweep at him. He follows her sprint off for her dorm with only mild wheezing, and sixty two minutes later has cat scratches up his hands and neck, but at least the pretty girl across campus won’t be committing an infraction of Section 7E.

“I didn’t make you late for any classes, did I?” The wide bathroom at the end of the girls’ dormitory hallway is lit up clean white, fluorescent, a mockery upon the dirtied cesspool the boys all share. They sit each upon the sink row counter, Maizono’s perfect manicure dotting cotton ball peroxide onto the gashes down his jawline. He cringes in pain, but manages, “...No, don’t worry! I don’t even have classes today.”

“Good,” she nods, smiling, peels the wrapper off a bandage to stick on his face. He glances for the mirror beside them. Hello Kitty print. “Then I can buy you a coffee now to say thank you. I don’t know what I would have done without you, Naegi. I’m just so happy Madonna and Cher are safe again.”

The tips of three fingers are wrapped in the same care, cutesy and pink above the black fabric of his gloves. “...Can I get a muffin?”

Maizono laughs, brushing a hand across his shoulder. “Of course, silly. Anything you want.”

Anything. Naegi studies his reflection another stretch, sighing enough through the nose to paint fog upon it.

A biting, biting morning.


	5. Chapter 5

_Due to your poor attendance at college, you are invited to attend the attendance clinic on October 1st from 1pm to 2pm to discuss any problems you may be experiencing which are affecting your attendance so we can support you. Details of the meeting will be kept on your student file._

_If you do not attend you will be issued with a Stage 1 attendance warning. This is an official written warning which will remain on your file._

_If you have any questions please ask at campus reception._

“That’s why I tell you, don’t open your school email, bro.”

Over his shoulder where he’s criss cross on the bed, Kuwata munches amid his wisdom, swiping orange residue off his fingers as he crushes the empty snack bag. It joins the other dozen in the corner trash bin.

Naegi groans into his laptop screen.

“I barely even missed any classes so far! Just...that one Law and Lit the other day...and a couple English classes, ‘cause it’s so early in the morning...and, uh, when we skipped Trig to play basketball with Hagakure and that sophomore guy-“

“Souda? Fuck that guy.” He leans to select a bag of salt and vinegar from the sea of cellophane on the middle table betwixt their beds; he’s chewing a mouthful as he says, “Don’t bother with the stupid attendance seminar thing. I bet ya I got it too. Warning shmarning, not like they’re gonna kick you out.”

Sighing, Naegi steals a look at the corner time before shutting the computer, tipping his head backward in all the world’s vexation. “Well, they could have given me more notice...the thing starts in less than an hour...”

“Exactly. Fight the patriarchy, sister.”

Kuwata drops one hand to Naegi’s tipped forehead, smoothing roughly his bangs backward. He shakes himself out from beneath it, smirking ever slight, to stand and sigh and fill his coat pockets with travel goods (cell phone, room key, three pouches of Panda cookies). On his walk from the main doors, he checks mentally back over the email, time and location, right, he’s got it, tucks his bandaged fingers into the pockets to fight the new month’s winding cold.

Orange billows around every step, leaves fallen and frozen over, teasing. A group of leather clad, liner eyed kids older than him travel around the bend of a closeby tree, one he’s an inch from slamming his teeth into before catching himself with wide breeze-milky eyes. He takes a breath to steady his will. This week’s not his best. No problem.

The hall hosting the seminar sits a meter away, normally some sort of math room if the leftover dry erase board symbols are an indication. A few stragglers sit dispersed among the rows, all fitting the image of a truant with their ripped knee jeans and faded tee shirts. Subconsciously, Naegi tugs his jacket closer at the middle, knocks his knees together to hide their freed flesh as he finds a seat for himself. He waves briefly to a soft middled girl two rows in, and stuffs himself into the empty seat to her left. Tsumiki from Trigonometry weepily mumbles something about mental health days not counting as excused absences, to which he nods a bit, understanding, and glances forward to an oncoming shadow.

“Hey, you’re Kirigiri’s friend, right?” Blink. Naegi almost asks whether or not it’s he who is being spoken to, but supposes her direct gaze upon him alone is enough to avoid the question. Instead, he nods, and the girl exhales relief as she sits in the spot beside him. “Good, I thought I recognized you. At least there’s someone here I _kinda_ know. This is so humiliating! Just because I forgot to _officially_ drop this stupid Law and Literature class before switching courses means I _missed_ all those classes. Technicalities.” She strips herself from her thin hoodie to allow toned shoulders their freedom. “I wish I could just take another gym class. I’d never skip that.”

Naegi tilts his head to better look at the girl. It clicks. “Law and Literature..? Are you the one that came in late the first day?”

The girl pauses all her motions to scoff. “Yeah, oh my God, you’re in that class with that asshole teacher?” Her eyes roll, though pop back to geniality to introduce, “I’m Asahina. Kirigiri lives across the hall from me, I see you in our wing all the time.” She leans forward, chest in lap, to wave across to the next girl by his side. “Hi, I’m Aoi! I love your sweater.”

Hardly notable, Tsumiki gasps, yet softens quickly to blush ear to ear. “...Really?”

All focus from him is lost then, keen enough to halfway listen on the conversation throwing back and forth across him. Three minutes pass before he’s checking his phone, smirking at a bastardly text from his roommate, sticking it back in his coat at the sharp arrival of jurisdiction.

“Sit down. Be quiet. I don’t have any energy for stupidity, and I’m certain this room is full of it.”

Echoes billow off with the drop of a briefcase satchel to the front table’s top. Asahina swats Naegi on the shoulder and gives a drop dead look, to which he slips far as he can down in his seat. Tsumiki flinches with every slam of books, drawers, hands.

“Well,” Togami exhales, glaring them all down across the vast room. “Apparently being the most recently hired staff member constitutes being appointed the delinquent supervisor. At least let me ensure you’ve all showed up.” He plucks a paper from among the contents his bag had released, sneers broadly after a scan. “Oh, joy. Asahina Aoi.”

Beside himself, she groans _heeere,_ but does not garner a glance from the supervisor, merely a check of his pen as he continues down the roster. “Asano.” Pause. Response. “Atsuki.” Pause. Response. “Daita.”

The list goes on its roll, pauses, responses or silence upon which he’ll click his teeth and scribble something beside the name, read the next, breed the cycle. The barked name _Kuwata_ engenders the click and the scribble, a minor smirk from Naegi though nothing more out of stomach sickness anticipating the next lines.

“Minami. Murayama. Na-“ A pause earlier than warranted this time, but he catches himself promptly. “Naegi.”

“... _Here._ ” He’s the exception that Togami’s eyes do look upward to meet, how lucky for him. He melts further into the wood of his seat.

The list finishes off after another minute of call and response. Togami tosses the page into a folder. Hands on the desk, he cranes his neck up at them all and directs, “I don’t care what you do for the next hour, just don’t be annoying, and we’ll get along beautifully.”

He’s got a grip on his chair to lower himself into it when an interjection from the far back halts him. “Aren’t you, like, supposed to support us, or whatever that email said?”

Togami perks up to search for the voice, Naegi following his line of sight in a turn around. Oh, that sophomore guy; one leg perched up on the seat in front of him, clothes baggy, teeth filed. Evidently, Togami doesn’t enjoy the look of him either.

“It isn’t my job to _support_ you. Call home to your mommy if you came here for support.” Before claiming his chair, he ends with final sage, “Judging by that hideous color you’ve painted your hair, I suspect you could use the guidance.”

The boys sitting around him nudge elbows into his sides, guffawing at their friend’s expense, who curls forward with a forearm thrown over his eyes and bottom lip gnawed. “Hey! N-Not cool, man!”

Naegi swivels back toward the front, heavy in the ribcage. His nose pokes right back into the conversation being held over his chest, Asahina offering her favorite dry shampoo brands and Tsumiki quietly nodding along, a green sprout growing toward the sunlight. He purses his lips, glancing up to the room’s front where papers have scattered over the desk and glasses slipped down the nose for focus.

Excusing himself does little besides lose his emptied seat to Asahina, but he pays it no mind, rather must focus on willing his knees not to collapse upon him. Naegi skates up toward the desk, a motion that doesn’t seem quite so daunting this time around. “Professor Togami?”

His neck creaks when he looks up at him. Naegi winces at his glower, at his short, “What.”

“I wanted to say sorry for missing last class. Um, well see, my friend Maizono lost her cats- I mean, her, uh, shoes. And I had to help her find them. And Kuwata tipped over the vending machine in the lobby, so that took some time… Anyway-”

“Naegi,” rolls his eyes, “I don’t care. Skip all my classes if that’s what you want. It’s your future, not mine.”

“Well, right, it’s just that I don’t want you to think I don’t care about your class, or anything, it was a total mistake-”

“What part of _I don’t care_ do you not understand? Take a seat.”

Something about it strikes him, makes him tilt his head and peer at him in the stupidest concern. “...Sorry. Are you...okay?”

Perhaps if Beowulf had asked after the dragon like so, he’d still be weaving his tale today. That’s how Naegi sees it- compassion’s all anybody ever really needs.

Naegi will most likely need a medic if Togami continues to stare at him this way.

“Am I _okay?”_ And he scoffs out some sort of sickly bemusement. “Yes, my dear student, I’m feeling just wonderful. I _love_ to spend my one break stuck here with a group of punks who can’t even bother to show up to the classes their parents are paying hundreds of thousands for. I love to work sunup to sundown just to have those punks skip _my_ class, and then come and kiss my ass to apologize for it, thinking if they look this cute I’ll let them off easy. I love to be treated like an _equal_ when I was born a full-fledged God among you all, a God who doesn’t even get to have His damn lunch break today. I’m fine. Take a seat.”

In all his pitiful millimeters of glory, Naegi stands, hands in pockets, feet wiggling. He looks up at Togami, as if to say something, say anything, but instead pulls back into himself to turn and comply. Before lift off, fingers massaging cellophane, he pulls out from a pocket a pouch of cookies, drops them on the desk, and turns away to find his seat again.

Togami peers downward long enough to stir an ache his neck.

“Jeez, I could hear him yelling at you all the way over here,” Asahina murmurs once Naegi returns. “Total assface.”

The room is quiet aside from soft chatter there and here, pencils lapping notebook lines. Arms still tucked at his sides, Naegi takes a look around them, at everything, then looks to her with sea glass for eyes. “He’s just having a bad day.”


	6. Chapter 6

Sometimes, he shows up to class, and the teacher will tell him, hello, Naegi, we’re having a test today, are you prepared? and he’ll, of course, respond, no, ma’am, I actually am not prepared whatsoever, may I take this another day? and everything tastes of spun sugar in his mouth.

And then he blinks away from his daydream, and glances at the clock forty minutes from dismissal, and glances at his test paper with only his name so far written upon it, and everything tastes of rosewater perfume.

If he fails this course, he’ll have to double up on literature classes next year. His knee bounces beneath the desk. Won’t that be something.

Furtively, he twists his sockets to check how far along Kirigiri’s gotten. The fold over of her first stapled page isn’t what he’s hoped to see.

His pencil taps a mile a minute against the table. Around him, he’s himself and seat partner, way up at the front the hunch of Fukawa’s spine and stench of pen ink. He’d wondered, shortly, where Hagakure’s gone once class had begun without him, to which Kirigiri had told him he’d dropped from the class last time it’d met, because campus reception had directed him toward a class that may cause less of a GPA deficit. Naegi had said, _huh,_ then, not questioning, a mere acknowledgement, and now there’s thirty-six minutes left of the block, and he decides a one in four chance for each multiple choice question isn’t such terrible guessing odds.

When the three remaining pupils receive back their scores one week post, he decides, well, shit, one in four isn’t so awesome if it results in a fifty eight.

Togami paces the front aisle in slow, slow, dreadful steps.

“I don’t quite see the point in continuing this course, most days,” he admits, wrists held behind the back and eyes always steadied. Without anyone but the two of them in the classroom, the steps clack twice as loud. “But then, one of you will write me an acceptable essay, or do well on a test, and I decide I should continue trying so long as you are. I don’t feel that way when I see your work, Naegi.”

“I’m sorry, Professor, I really should have done better on that te-”

“I tried to encourage you, did I not?” His tone never crosses into cross. “I told you you’d done well, and I’d like to see more of it. I told you not to waste my time. Is marking forty-two percent of a test wrong a good use of my time?”

“Um,” hands squeeze his kneecaps, “No, sir. Probably not.”

Slow as his moves, Togami nods. “So, what we can conclude from this data, is that I should no longer waste my breath telling you the good things you’ve done, and from now on focus on the bad? Will you succeed if I demean you? Curse at you? Hold you over my knee and spank you?”

...Maybe. Wisely, he shakes his head. “No, sir. Probably not.”

A scoff. “You won’t succeed if I praise you, and you won’t succeed if I scold you, so what you’re telling me is, you won’t succeed at all, no matter what I do.”

“Well, hold on,” he tries. “I...I think I’m doing pretty good in my other classes- well...except English, but that’s not important.” His cheekbones burn with starlight. “I can do it, I know I can. Everything will turn out alright if I keep on working harder.”

Toward his first row seat, Togami creeps, step after step, to lock their gazes, lock him in place with such vigor he shakes; and in one hand, one lifted faultless hand, he grasps each side of Naegi’s jaw, squeezing as one does their stress from a ball, gentle aggression, embalming him in nerve.

“You’re a goddamned anomaly.” His grip falls inward more. “I can’t stand you.”

One eye pinched shut, Naegi speaks with squished, muffled lips, “...Sorry?”

Another minute of staring, and he’s dropped back down with fingerprints on his skin. His cat scratch scars all sing. He rubs idly his jawline as Togami walks away from him, belongings collected over himself, pure vanishing act.

The meeting sears itself in his mind in a drill to the core. He tosses and turns his blankets into a tornado wrap once the skyline dies, waking to peel himself from their messy strangle the next morning new. Naegi sighs at himself in the wall mirror. Comb teeth rip their way down his scalp.

“Hey, sorry I’m a little late, I couldn’t really sleep last night.”

His laugh is small, rivaling sunshine, as he sits across from her at the pavilion table outside an on campus cafe. They’d made the plan to meet for breakfast, though urging his stomach to quell its ache enough for food could be a million yen challenge. A pretty girl walks by clutching a cream topped pastry. Perhaps he’ll be a millionaire.

Across, Kirigiri only folds one ankle over the other, lifting her tea cup to her lips a smooth moment. She’s got this breathtaking way about her, hair lilac in the sun, drifting down to frame her face that tells no tales but the world’s whole; she looks at him with passion concealed behind her eyes, silent, a cat hopped up in the lap when one comes home crying. He strokes between her ears in saying, “Ah, I don’t know… I guess I’m stressed.”

She looks at him.

He sighs, “I’m having a hard time in Law and Lit. Togami keeps on lecturing me about how much I suck. I think it’s getting to me.”

She looks at him.

“I know, yeah. But I don’t know what else to do besides work harder. And even then it probably won’t be good enough for him.”

She sips her tea cup.

“And you know what else is kinda weird? He...touched my face. It kinda hurt.”

She looks at him. She nods. She rises from her seat.

Naegi blinks around a moment, a lost kitten now without a warm belly to nestle on, until her boot heels click against the pavement and there’s a warm glaze-dripping cinnamon bun set before him.

Settling again, she folds her legs. “I’m thinking of dropping that class.”

“ _What?”_ spews flecks of pastry off the tongue. He blinks as a blush arises, wiping his mouth on a sleeve, swallowing. “You can’t drop that class. You’re the only reason I still go.”

“Is that so?” tempts she behind the rim of her cup. “You’ve seemed to find yourself around the professor quite often.”

Cinnamon bun cream across his lips, Naegi widens his lids at her. “I...no, I haven’t! He’s just one of my teachers. I don’t know. He’s fascinating, like you said. ...He’s just one of my teachers, don’t be weird, Kyouko.”

She smirks in another hot sip.

Naegi’s face blooms rose petals.

“It would be entirely inappropriate.”

“What would-? Uck, stop being weird! I don’t _want_ to spend more time with him, like I...wanna be around him, or something weird like that.” Shifting his sight around, Naegi stuffs the last bite into his mouth to surrender speech.

“Weird, hm?”

“ _Please.”_

Kirigiri takes to bobbing her head along lightly with the ambient cafe music, toasting him forward with a tip of her cup. Naegi buries his scarlet face deep in his sleeves.

It lifts away, paled again, to the bright eleven am sunlight of the across campus lecture hall. His headache nearly blinds him.

“So it’s only the two of you now, is that it?” He leans back against the hard oak desk, ankles crossed, arms folded. The notice in his hand slaps down behind him to the desk top. “Fine with me. Rarely have I met someone so _pisse-froid.”_

“Haah...you’re s-so right, Professor,” wafts from the front row. “At least I’m still here, I would never g-give up an opportunity to listen to your wisdom.”

Half lidded eyes loll to the opposite side of her. Naegi bounces his knee below the desk.

With one hand, he pushes his glasses upright, says just vaguely, “Read the next chapter. I'll grade your latest papers.”

That alights some sense of excitement in him- he’d worked his fingers raw on this one. Not a single grammar error, one inch margins, every last letter perfected. Pride balls up in his throat, at the snap of a finger going to work flipping to the right textbook page. His notebook folds open beside it for any note he wishes to take down mid-read, index cards of vocabulary terms fluttering about with it.

His paper is handed back to him with a 85/100 underlined atop it.

He grips his hands to fists in such tight, tight ebullience they leave nail imprints in his palms.

The next test, two weeks further, is finished with a quarter of the block leftover, and given back with only nineteen percent marked wrong this time.

On his bed that night, his limbs all flail in kicks and punches upward as if he were an upturned turtle on the marsh edge of paradise. Flushed with exertion, delight, disbelief, he rests himself, breathing out the nose as he grips the test packet up before his gaze again. He’s grinning, sure, up until thirty seconds of ogling passes and it begins to slip. By the time Kuwata’s nudged their door open, towel wrapped round the waist and goatee dripping, he’s bearing a full on scowl.

“Why so grumpy, Naegs? Miss me that much?” He guffaws his way to their closet to grab cotton down from the shelves. Naegi drops the pages to his chest to watch him idly, sighing out hard, “I got an eighty-one on my last Law and Lit test.”

Boxers pull up his legs, towel dropped in a heap to the carpet. “Uh, I dunno about you, man, but I’d be pretty damn happy if that was the worst thing about my day.”

Naegi’s mouth purses as he sits upright. “No, it’s not the grade itself that’s bad, it’s just...I don’t know, actually. I guess I miss Kirigiri being in class.”

“Well, jeez, if you need to jerk it that bad, the room across the hall is still empty.” His thumb gestures harshly in the direction of said vacancy. To Naegi’s pout, he snorts, bends himself over to slip a tee shirt over his head. “You know I’m just messing with ya. Maybe you’d feel better if you got out more. Wanna watch my baseball practice tomorrow? Maizono’s gonna be there. And Mioda.” He cringes into, “Yikes.”

Naegi cannot help rolling his eyes. “I can’t tomorrow. I have to- oh, shit.”

A touch frantic, he searches to grasp his phone. Kuwata questions him in a tilt of the head. Naegi exhales a harsh note. “I have to work on that Trig project with Tsumiki tomorrow, it’s due the day after. But I was so wrapped up in studying for that Lit test that I totally forgot. I already told Hagakure I’d help him write his Creative Writing story.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate,” Kuwata says, slipped beneath his comforter. “Wanna hand me that lighter while you’re up, bud?”

Naegi shifts a glance over their middle table, lifting and tossing it over his way before taking steps in his desired direction. “I’m gonna go tell him I can’t do it tomorrow. I hope he’s still awa-”

Surprise flexes around him enough to silence him, once he’s gripped the door knob and pulled it open to newfound sockdolager.

Hallway light casts his shadow inside their room, one fist raised in preparation to knock, muscles rigid head to tarsals.

“P...Professor?”  
  
“Hey! Tall blond dude!” Kuwata shouts from his bed, blowing smoke around it. Then, in white faced horror, tucks the lit blunt in his hand off behind whatever’ll hide it. “I-I mean, evening, sir.”

Naegi whips his head back, forth between the two, settles upon watching Togami’s whole form quiver, as one does upon hitting a toe into a table leg around the whole extended family, bottom to top, tea kettle sanity.

“Did you-Did you need something?” Concern flicks in Naegi’s eyes. Togami rips his own away.

“...Nothing,” he spits. Without further hesitation, his necktie is flying behind him in a swift step away from the situation, down the hall to the top of the stairs before Naegi has even the chance to blink.

“Um...okay,” Naegi musters, while Kuwata offers, “Should’ve invited him in, he seemed pretty cool.”

Smoke billows up behind his head. Naegi looks left, looks right, and steps out into the glaring hallway light.


	7. Chapter 7

There’s a 97 on his next paper.

He glances up, disbelieving, at his teacher once he’s slapped it on his desk. Togami eyes him mildly, dark and attenuated, and strolls on past.

Fukawa bites her thumb bloody as the red pen 70/100 on hers.

“Talk to me about the reading I gave for homework.” Togami’s tone reads defeated, almost, a weighted sigh, leans slight to his desk and crosses his arms. “One of you, please, impress me.”

Where her hand flies upward, Naegi is tentative about lifting his own, but does so and is quickly granted a nod to lower it. “Well...I thought it was kinda cool how the guy talked about the way the mind works, when it comes to irony and all that. How sometimes people will say something, just to get someone else to say something they can argue. Kinda sounds like a lawyer thing, yeah.”

“ _The guy,”_ mimics Togami. “You mean Socrates _._ ”

“Yeah, him,” Naegi assures, curving a dopey little simper. “I dunno, he seems smart. That elenchus thing sounds a lot like the way Kirigiri talks to me sometimes.”

Togami clicks his tongue to his front teeth. Fukawa snorts up a growling scoff, and refutes, “You really think you can compare anyone to an ancient Greek philosopher? I doubt you even did the homework, i-idiotic snail…”

He draws back to peer at her snarling disposition. “I did,” he assures. “I mean...I think I did…”

“Hah! You don’t even know w-whether you did or not!”

“No, actually, I definitely did it, see?” Naegi smiles as he lifts an index card of scrawled notes for her to see, pinging his eyes straightforward to Togami’s. “Socratic irony.”

He remains staid a moment, then bursts forward into a snorting laugh. “ _Hardly_. ...But I’ll give it to you.”

Fukawa tugs a braid so gruffly it withers her scalp.

“Start drafting your analysis of that article’s relation to what you’ve studied in the first few chapters,” Togami instructs. “We’ll start reading Demosthenes’ _Against Meidias_ next class.”

Something keeps that smile strung in place far past appropriate of him. Naegi touches his fingertips to his mouth, clears his throat to shake himself flat. Two minutes of shuffling his laptop open, tapping a finger on the keyboard base, it returns in full wriggling force. In through the nose, out through the mouth; he steals a peek over his computer screen to ensure no one’s taken to staring at him, pleasant to find himself single still and returns to his work.

A few inches down the first page, the words all mash together so hideously he can’t bear to follow it. Something. Naegi plays a staring match with the wall of windows until he’s the will to nod himself on. One finger falls to the backspace key. He shivers.

The rush carries flush beneath his bangs the whole walk back to his dorm. The next return breathes flame down his back.

He forgets his notebook on his bed.

When the test on their latest literature piece comes post two weeks, he’s positive the answer to question four is B, but C seems too enticing a choice not to circle. And he knows the open response at the end should be a full page, but...two paragraphs gets his point across well enough.

A stack of paperwork slaps roughly enough on the hard oak desk to reverberate.

“What the hell kind of _point_ are you attempting to make here?”

Naegi has to keep himself from biting his lip.

“I thought we were done with this charade,” Togami insists, fury lighting his voice. “I expect _much_ higher quality work from you. As it stands right now, _Fukawa_ looks smarter than you. How could you let it come to that?”

Shrugging, he stares at his lap where his fingers fiddle. “I-I don’t know, Professor. Are you sure I’m really doing that bad?”

From the pile between them Togami snatches one sheet. His throat clears before reading, “Naegi Makoto, Law and Literature, 6 November. The reading we did about the Greek scientists relates to the stuff we learned in class because they are both about how the law used to exist a long time ago and how it also exists today and I think that’s really cool.” He smacks the paper back down to the desk, glaring at its author across it. Naegi writhes in embarrassment.

“How did you honestly expect that to do better than absolute zero? And this test, for fuck’s sake, I didn’t think it was possible to score under twenty five.”

His flesh dances at the vulgarity. He should greatly get a hold upon himself, yet the rush is too kind.

“I don’t know what’s going on, maybe I need some...tutoring?”

The knife-wielder’s expression answers that suggestion.

“What you _need_ is to quit acting like a fool for no good reason,” he insists, tossing the paper out of sight. “I work too hard to have to deal with issues like capricious intelligence. Get it together, or get out of my class.”

“Right,” he assures. Held breath phases from him in a rise. With Togami a meter from the exit, his nerve catches up to him. “Um, Professor-!”

He very practically _hears_ the eyeroll, but attention is granted nonetheless, enough for him to stutter and spell, “...I’m sorry for not inviting you inside that night you came to my dorm. I wasn’t expecting it. You can come back another time and-”

“That’s enough.” His voice is slicing. “Focus on your studies instead of worrying about trivial things as my own mistakes.”

Moonlight blinds him through the drawn bedroom shade.

“Hey, Naegs, what’s the square root of sixteen?”

Arms support betwixt hair and pillow. The lava lamp gleams soft orange upon Kuwata’s frame, hunched on his own bed, legs criss cross, notebook on the lap pencil atop.

It’s a cold night, this one, though they’ve both chosen the wrap of tee shirts and underwear; cotton are the sheets against his bare calves. Naegi thrums in quiet thought, murmurs, “Four.”

Nodding, scribbling. A minute later: “What numbers add up to one and multiply to negative twenty?”

“Jeez, I don’t know- are you just asking me all the Trig homework questions?”

His graphite stalls. “Maybe…” To Naegi’s sighed out response, Kuwata flips the notebook closed to cast all attention on him. “What’s up with you, dude? Can’t stand you all...depressy.”

Tight fall his lips, ceiling his target of eyes. “...You can keep a secret, right?”

Kuwata’s brows tip forward, urging. Naegi fumbles for the words.

“Well...Well, Kirigiri was talking to me a little while ago, about how maybe I...how maybe I might go out of my way sometimes to spend time with my literature professor- Togami. Tall blond dude.” Kuwata nods. Naegi winces. “I don’t really think I do- well, I didn’t until recently, when I started kinda...screwing up some assignments just so he’d have to talk to me about them.”

“Oh ho, the ol’ after school lesson, huh?” Kuwata winks with a grin, to which he can only shake his head.

“ _No_ , but it’s like,” and here lies the blushing mess of a man he refutes, “...maybe I wouldn’t mind that-”

“ _HAHAH!_ Naegi’s got a crush on his _profeeessooor-!”_

“I-I don’t, no way!” His face could start a wildfire. Palms up slap to cover it. “I just...I don’t know! I want to get know him better, I think he could use a friend… And he’s...well, he's good looking-”

“Naegi, come _on.”_ A scoff tosses outward. From the table corner beside him, he lifts his half emptied can and slurps radiant green energy drink from it. “You’ve totally got the hots for him. Too bad for you that’s a crazy huge violation of Section 17A.”

“Huh?”

He sets the drink down with an eyeroll. “You know how long it took to get Eyebrows off my back? I think I got the whole stupid handbook memorized for real now. Speakin’ of which,” draws him into a lean for the meager loot still dispersed over the middle table from that exertion. Bags of Panda cookies build a moat around the lava lamp. He selects one to toss at the other’s chest.

Naegi looks at the snack in disdain. “...I don’t think I can eat these anymore.”

“Fine, alright,” he hears, and within half the second is beaned in the head by a bag of Funyuns. Naegi sighs. He pulls the snack open and crunches a few before venturing, “Um...what’s Section 17A about?”

“Teacher-student relations,” answers the mouthful of cool ranch chips. “Basically, it’s like,” a pause for chewing, wet and mouthy, “don’t bang any of your students, or we’ll fire ya.”

“Oh,” Naegi replies. “But it doesn’t say anything about friendships, does it?”

“I think they’re called _ill-advised,_ but not against the rules, no.” Some sort of hope waves its wings then, though Kuwata grasps it in a fist- “But that doesn’t concern you, anyway, since you’re trying to get on your knees under his desk and-”

“ _Kuwata-!”_

“Hey, hey, cool it,” he snickers. “If I swang that way, I’d be all over that guy, too. For your sake, I’d start by getting to know him as more than just some tight ass professor. He’s probably way more chill outside class, y’know?”

“Something makes me doubt that…”

“Don’t sweat it.” Geniality comes aside palms swiping crumbs, notebook twisting back out from itself. “What’d you get for number six?”

He’s frenetic to scribble the answers to his own number six seven eight nine forever forever thirty seconds before the Trigonometry period is set to begin.

(Perhaps he’s been a bit distracted lately, what with the sleeping three hours a night and all).

When the block concludes, he’s had half of a nap hardly breathed through, sickly with the wet of fatigue around his eyes. His back aches beneath his bookbag as he trails across campus for the next class to claim him, and the next and the next and the next nights grow colder with passing time and trembling dreams. Thursday mid morn, he has a coffee date with Kirigiri, who’s stare he writhes underneath long as an ant begs with a magnifying glass overhead. She sips her tea, buys him a croissant and a cocoa once his pockets turn up void of wallet, and watches his every move.

“A- A few classes ago, we learned about this thing called Socratic irony, and elenchus,” Naegi decides to bring up. “It reminded me of you.”

Mildly, she sips her drink, and nods gratitude for it.

The weekend rolls by in assignment catch up, a class here and there, a basketball throbbing past his slouched courtside form and the loathsome tightness of being dragged along. But he’s got time to kill. Lots.

Tuesday morning, eleven AM, he has Law and Literature.

He misses it.

The following week, he pays for that.

“Skipping my class again,” Togami scoffs at him. The bright fluorescent of the lights and the windows scorch him mighty. To where the professor stands, he must squint, must hide his shame in a simpering shrug. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be left alone with _her?”_

Fukawa flinches, twirling a lock of dirty brunette in both hands as she mumbles something warm and wet. Naegi shrugs again. “Sorry. I wasn’t feeling so good.”

Togami’s eyes roll, though the student continues, “I saw you posted homework on your website, though. I did it all.”

“How thoughtful of you to take a glance at my assignments amid all the _illness_ and pot smoking,” he quips, makes Fukawa guffaw her witchly cackle at his dashing wit. He flicks a blond bang from the forehead. Naegi...smiles.

“Well...I’m here today. What’s up?” His muscles all tighten up to question next, “Did you have a good weekend, Professor?”

Glaring, his head falls to a tilt. “I won’t pass you just for doting on me, you know.”

Across the room, Naegi laughs, catching the third head of the room darting back forth between them to follow the chatter. “I’m just wondering. ...Do anything fun?”

“Naegi,” he at last clips. “My personal endeavors are irrelevant to this class period. Take your book out and quit pestering me.”

In a nod, stiff, straining, Naegi does as told in haste, slipping the latest novella from his bag to set on his desk, and to throw like a Frisbee onto his bed two hours later and fall face first atop it.

His back takes the poke of a pencil head long after life’s faded to black and back again. Naegi shifts about, groaning, pinches his nose all up to face the newcomer.

“Hey, baby,” grins Kuwata from above. “Lit go good today?”

It takes a moment, a thick wafting moment, before Naegi conjures his answer as another long groan and drop of himself back flat.

* * *

 “Yes, I promise. I- Yes, mom, I _promise._ Things are great. This semester is really...great.”

Frigid, though a sunlit afternoon. His spot beneath the cafe pavilion shades him just enough to keep his vision clean, to soak up sweet ultraviolet into his knuckles. A girl sprints her way past a few meters off, laughing and whooping something as her sneakers crunch through chilled leaves. Two boys tucked into their scarfs follow behind. Naegi’s attention flickers back to his own task.

“Yes, mom, I’m eating right- Kyouko is too, uh huh, don’t worry. No, I don’t need any money, don’t wo- Well, actually…” His head shakes itself. “I’m okay, really. ...Can I ask you about something though?”

Leaves slice with the wind’s kissing pull. He brings a hand to secure better the maroon knit hat over his hair. “Yeah- No, no! Nothing bad. I was just wondering, you met Dad in college, right? ...At the grocery store? But I thought he told me- No, right, you’re right. I- Oh, okay, right.” His lips purse, though he’s benevolent as ever, as always. “Mhm. Love you too. Mhm. Yeah, I know. Okay. Mhm. Love you too. Bye.”

“Sweet of you,” wisps the shadow fallen over his table. She sets herself down in the chair opposite him, sets her eyes upon him over the open space. To the front pocket, his cell phone slips. He offers his attention for her only, watching the sweep of lilac over one leather clad shoulder.

“No coffee?” Naegi tilts his head, the question earning its reply in a shake of her head, light and subtle. “We’re kinda sitting in a weird spot today, too- are you feeling alright?”

Her glove fibers interest her suddenly. There’s a stark breeze that tickles her bangs across her face, nudging them back down with one curled finger as she dollops her soft marshmallow stare on him.

“I like a change in scenery.”

From the wedge of his chair in the surrounding fence’s corner, he chooses to lean himself forward, compact like a birthday card at the waist, hands laced together. “Huh,” he acknowledges, surveying the lot of seniors whapping the tetherball back and forth to each other in a far off patch of grass. One boy he’s never seen, a stranger, keeps his baseball cap pressed low down to his brows as he traipses along the pathway nearest. Naegi watches his shoulders go up, down, before trailing over to a bench he must squint to see, but notes once he does the pretty pink skirt and strappy heels it supports. He hopes the boy has flowers.

Opposite, a bird creaks a branch to where next his focus is pulled. The little waxwing tuts about a bit in the tree bark before flicking off in search of another source. Naegi is close to tipping into contemplation of the day gone through, until it is that his head rests back toward the pathway to absorb a flashing surprise.

“He sits there around one o’clock everyday,” she murmurs. “About fifteen minutes. Then he leaves.”

Two hands clutch his hat to tug it down as far to his eyes as can fit, pupils darting above dark scarlet. “That’s why we’re sitting on this side today?!”

Kirigiri, the demoness, smiles the shortest stretch at him, because he’s just too sweet, standing with a push from the table. Soft plaid transfers from her shoulders to his, scarf wrapped up around his face to hide what’s left of his face. He dares to poke his nose up from the fabric, pushing the hat back to more regular place with staticked bangs emerging. Togami sits with his face in his phone screen. He’s wearing blue today, dark and crisp navy blue that turns his irises the shade of a Cayman summer; the lengths of his hands stick from buttoned sleeves, all perfect, fingers just the right length to lick buttercream off of- no, they’re just...hands, moving along his cell phone, demonstrating the most proper of work ethics.

Naegi keeps a steadied gaze upon him. People watching, is all, from betwixt scarf and hat where humiliation breathes, mapping out islands and trenches and plains along him. He’s sitting alone on a bench in the middle of campus, one o’clock, everyday. Alone. What he wouldn’t give to have been born himself higher than the shepherd’s charge, with more gall than the vigor to do right. Had he been chosen by the gods to be a happy go lucky little extrovert, he thinks he’d have one less problem at least per each day. He thinks he’d have more friends. He thinks he’d be on his knees under his desk and-

When he turns back forward again, he’s all alone at a cafe table at one o’clock, and a nonplussed glance back proves no longer a target for his focus there, either. Alone.

He thinks he’s starving.


	8. Chapter 8

Class begins and eleven-oh-one that day, and that’s when he knows something is horribly wrong.

Though the room isn’t so big as to call it a true hall, only three steps higher are the seats in the background rather than the fore, no echo, chalkdust coating fingers instead of dry erase- the room isn’t so big as to call it a lecture hall when it’s at its normal capacity of three, not a harrowing, sinister two.

“I was tired of her,” Togami shrugs, glancing out the twice bright windows. “This university’s poster progressivism treats any harassment claim the same as a bomb threat, practically.”

Naegi’s seated in his same spot as always, rows upon rows upon rows now away from the front without any others to break the chain. He dares a glance around. His expression twists to peculiarity. “Sooo...you’re still going to teach the class even though I’m the only one left..?”

“What do you expect me to do, sing you a song? Play chess?” Togami’s arms are folded, same as always, swiveling his eyes to the ceiling at his student’s stupidity, same as always. “Revise the paper you handed in to me last time. It should have been better.”

He breathes in a lift of his chin, nodding quickly in a reach for his bag. Only does he pause once Togami says, “...Your argument wasn’t bad, but the opening statement needs work.”

Aside the stupor, Naegi manages another nodding, drawing into himself more as the professor approaches to drop the first copy to his desk. “I’ve annotated for you the places you can improve.”

“Thank you,” breathes he, accepting the paper to flip through the vast volume of red pen in every margin. Forth he sets to his computer to embellish better the document, and by the time he allows himself to heal the screen burn of his eyes, the clock in the corner tells him class ends in ten.

“Um, Professor? I finished the revision, I-I think.” He’s bundled up into his outside jacket, fingers sprouted through half moon gloves. As he reaches the desk to set his computer down upon it, those very same fingers quake.

Togami leans back from where he’s been hunched over a correcting pen the whole block, bones creaking with age not yet accumulated, to stretch his arms forward and tug the screen close. That makes Naegi’s lip take bite. He shouldn’t worry, though. It’d be against policy to peruse his search history.

It isn’t much longer of standing there, one hand anchoring the bag strap at his shoulder, legs together, nerves brewing, before Togami clicks the laptop closed and pushes it back to its owner.

“...Well done.”

To the corner of the hard oak desk, he drops his backpack just long enough to stuff the computer inside and collect his own choking shock. “Really?”

Stars border his lashes. Togami closes his own, offers a lax approval. “This is what I expect from you, Naegi. This is the quality of work that it will take to keep me from cancelling this course altogether.”

Stiffly, Naegi nods. “Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.”

The last word, allotted to him, and with it he goes to stroll off for the sake of it being twelve:twenty-nine and the feeling he deserves a blueberry muffin in his gut immediately.

“Naegi.” It stops him colder than the sweat on his nape. Though he isn’t the same first day bairn that set his scared, scared foot in the door, there hardly still can live a man who does not tremble beneath the blade of imperialism. That blade sinks down to the handle into his chest the moment his plush powder lips open again.

“Next time you crave my attention that badly, don’t jeopardize your GPA over it.” His pen scrawls a further line. “Just ask.”

An instinct, his jaw rounds, claps back shut to shoulder pinching in; steam rises up his throat unto the face. “I-I...I-”

“Be gone now, class is over.” Without taking his eyes off his paperwork, Togami lifts one hand to shoo him away. The steps are taken in robotic, marching band gusto.

Just ask.


	9. Chapter 9

“He really said that? Like, for real real?”

Mid December chill doesn’t deter them from sporting.

Naegi trains his gaze on the ball as it passes from hand to hand, chin in the palms and elbows on knees as he plays the poutiest cheerleader to ever be scouted.

“Yeah, he...he really did.”

Across the court, sneakers squeak into a jump to steal the basketball away from Kuwata’s grasp, the new holder of it cheering at himself before advising, “Dunno, sounds like he wants to hang- he did say to ask him. If you do, invite me over, too. I miss Professor Togamichi’s funny way of talking.”

His mouth pinches to one side. Kuwata bounces on his toes with arms up flailing, curses spouting in claims of unfairness, though Hagakure seems perfectly content nestling the ball up in his hair as though a bird in a sweet winter’s nest just out of reach.

“I don’t know if he actually wanted me to ask, or if he was just being sarcastic.”

“My money’s on sarcasm, but then again, I’ve got ten yen.” Kuwata snickers at himself. He makes one last leap up to smack the ball back to the ground, and chases after it with flare. When he turns back from his missed basket, Hagakure’s lain to the dirt with arms folded behind his head, half dreaming, and the third is slumped still in his dolor. Taking a swallow of oxygen, Kuwata admonishes them, “Look at what’s become of my team! You’re all washed up. Hagakure, good work, keep on sleeping in the dirt like a goddamn bum. Naegi, if you wanna get laid so bad, invite the guy to our room tonight. I’ll bring snacks.”

“Tonight? Uh...” A finger touches his chapped cheek. “It’s kinda short notice… What if he says no?”

He says no.

A soda tab cracks loudly open. Kuwata passes it over the threshold between their two beds to the unwaiting hands of their guest. “Hope you like Dr. Hopper.”

From behind shined lenses, a glare cuts into the can’s green labeling. “I don’t.”

It’s a protracted bout there, with Kuwata leaning from his own bed to the one the other two perch themselves on, a meter stick apart, Naegi wincing more and more with every passing moment and the other lax with ire. Natural. He pulls the drink back, shrugs in a _suit yourself_ type of thug boy way, and slugs it himself. Togami pushes his glasses up with one lethally sharp finger.

He’d said no, because Kuwata had dragged his sweaty body off the basketball court with Naegi in a shove ahead of him, said _where’s he- in here?_ and thrown him inside the miniature classroom with all the big windows; Togami had, yes, been there, and had, yes, had a class of several strewn out among the seats, and Naegi, all alone, had stammered something about needing help with a homework assignment, and his professor had told him he’s capable, do it yourself, and the redheaded girl in the front had heckled him into perfect submission with her challenging, _oh, come on, you’re the teacher and you can’t spare ten minutes to help your student?_ Togami Byakuya had gone red at the ears and bared at the teeth to spit back by God he can too, and Naegi had come close to blacking out but remembers next he’d said, half aware, “Um, g-great. Sorry for interrupting. Can you help me later tonight, around seven maybe? You know where my dorm is.”

The girl in the back with long streaky locks, Maizono’s friend, yeah, had given a long lovey dovey _ooooooh!_ at that, hot enough to make papers furl and lower her grade ten points.

Naegi thinks he’ll take Creative Writing next year.

“Okay, party games,” Kuwata announces after silence has strangled them all awhile. On his hop up, he sets his drink on the table before the stagnant stereo of which he dips his elbow upon to start up some trashy punk rock. The lava lamp is a sweet tangerine. “Togami, up for twenty questions?”

“Twenty...questions,” he says in turned face disdain, sneering up a lip while Kuwata slacks his own, “You never heard of twenty questions before? Alright, it’s real simple. I ask you twenty questions, and then you...Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Ready?”

“Kuwata, I don’t think-”

“Okay, so,” cuts off Naegi’s attempted plea, “how do you like your steak?”

Still with that tense tilt of the jaw, Togami is slow in his acceptance of it, slow to unravel himself even the most subtle of motions. “...Rare.”

“Eggs?”

“Over medium.”

“Pancakes?”

“I don’t eat pancakes.”

“C’mon, everybody likes pancakes.” And comes the smirk next. “Ever have hangover pancakes? That’s how Naegi likes ‘em.”

“He’s- He’s just kidding-!”

“Okay, switching topics. If an alien species showed up and was all _take. me. to your. leeeader_ \- who’d you point them toward?”

Togami rolls either eye, unfolds his arms to rest at his sides. “I’d say, you’re goddamned looking at him.” His lenses push up again. “Were that question at all plausible, of course.”

“Hah! You’re a damn riot, Professor. Maybe I’ll switch into one of your classes.”

“Please,” his held up palm protests. “I’d rather not subject myself to that.”

Kuwata lays backward on his bed, ribs poking, grasps for a single laugh. “ _Hell_ ,” he says to the ceiling, “I guess that means it’s time for the lightning round.”

Entirely discorant, he slaps his hands together as he sits back straight again, rubbing them as two sand blocks would sharpen. Naegi watches on in quiet wonder.

“Favorite color?”

“Gold.”

“Song?”

“Nocturne Opus 9 Number 2.”

“Booze?”

“Scotch,” Togami says. “Neat.”

“What kinda car do you drive?”

“All of them.”

“How do you take your coffee?”

“Too personal. Next.”

“Fine- vanilla or chocolate?”

“I don’t eat sweets.”

“Satin or silk?”

“Silk, good _Lord_.”

“You gay?”

“Of co- _What?”_

“He’s kidding,” Naegi barks immediately, eyes like tennis balls.

Hand caressing his chin, Kuwata wiggles out a smirk, though chooses in time to quell it. “Sorry, sometimes I forget you’re not just one of the guys. You’re real young, you know that?”

“No, it’s never once crossed my mind,” Togami says through his teeth. A thumb and index finger go to either side of his glasses frames to push them into a place they have not slipped from, and were Naegi less keen, he’d point out the scorching heat formed beneath them.

“Okay.” Kuwata collapses into his bed again, one arm reaching blindly for his soda whilst he grants, “You take it from here, Naegs. I’m all questioned out.”

“Um…” No longer is he fearful of his literature instructor, not like earlier days gone past, but when he’s in his own bedroom, on his own bed, a darkened chamber with a lava lamp bubbling carmine and latent alternative humming off the table speakers, and that literature instructor is looking dead at him across the length of his mattress, he’ll admit to being just a _touch_ intimidated. “D...Do you...like...cats?”

Togami lifts his finger to his tautened mouth as if to speak disappointment. “They’re fine.”

Naegi inhales the stench of his own stupidity. “Uh, right. ...I like cats,” worsens the stink. “Hello Kitty. She’s great.”

Togami glances at his wristwatch, which Naegi takes as a panic inducing enough sign to stuff his mouth with foot. “Ahuhm- are you having fun?”

“Does that count for one of the twenty, or are you just attempting small talk?” He straightens his lapel. “Regardless, I have no opinion on the matter.”

His brows curve up into each other. Kuwata’s bed creaks with the weight of his twisting about, forcing his sneakers off of grayed out socks.

“You can-” Time’s trailed off into two switches of color from the lamp. He only pauses his newfound thought to glance over at the rightward sound of snores. Naegi could laugh, but doesn’t; he turns back to Togami and says, lower, “You can, um, take off your coat if you want.”

“No,” comes quick enough to hang him. Naegi blinks, until softer flows, “...I’m fine.”

To it, he nods, slouches more so forward into nighttime comfort. He’s lost track of how many questions he’s got left, though supposes Togami’s bored of it all the same as he is too nervous to be pressed with free thought. Kuwata rattles another loud breath of sleep. Naegi fiddles with the edge of his sleeve.

“Tell me something.” His chin draws up at that. Draws, and stays, because Togami’s glistening in a look he’s yet to catch, not so much different from his usual to incite riots but altogether just a pinch enough of something so soft he cannot stand the memory of its preamble. “What’s your goal here?”

He must tilt his head at that, tapping, wondering. It’s safe of him to say his front, he’ll venture. “Well,” and he does, “I think you’re pretty nice, and I like being around you in class. Maybe we could be frie-”

“I mean at this university, Naegi, what’s your goal here? Masters, minors, what have you?”

Naegi blinks, pink up to the wrists. “Oh. ...I don’t know yet.”

Eyes in one palm, Togami sighs, “My God, I can’t stand you.”

His body wiggles. Naegi leans toward the table, and slings his legs back up into a criss cross atop his blankets. The vending machine brownie breaks in half in his hands, one side offering up to his guest. Togami stares at it in its crumbly glory sitting in the bare palm of his student, and reaches to accept it. Naegi chews in quiet placidity behind the staticky radio commercial ad in between ballads. The lava lamp is green again. His favorite.

“I think we’re on question fifteen,” he mumbles after a bit of that. It’s dark in here, in this hole in the hall bedroom from which light pours beneath the door with muffled sounds of life around it. They’re in a chamber, in a cold sterile box of band posters plastered to the walls, dirty laundry spilling from closet shelves. When Naegi glances out the back wall window, he sees it’s begun to snow. “...What do you do everyday, when you’re just sitting outside alone? On-On the bench out there, by the cafe.”

Someone on the college radio station declares it’s past eight, and that the transition into night warrants a smooth welcome, upon which the next song glides finger pads down piano keys and not a word breathed. Togami does not meet his eye as he murmurs, “It appears I’ve got a stalker.”

“No!” insists Naegi with speed. “I just- it was Kirigiri, really. We saw you there the other day. You looked kind of lonely...”

The white comforter of the outside reflects sand pink light back up against the window’s face. Perhaps it’s the softness of that, or the piano or the deep cobalt of the lava lamp, but nothing in Naegi tells him to pull away when his professor grasps him beneath the chin and kisses him soft on the lips.

They hover there, the pair of them, hand underneath his chin, lips half a breath from touching another time, just there together, as if magic, as if magnetic, as if all the forces of all the world have joined together this night to shoulder all woes and make his ruby heels never once click.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Naegi admits, a heartsick dope that knows not his own hands, then, and Togami pulls back without looking at him, no rush in his movements even once they’ve sundered.

The radio dips evening shadows in melody. Naegi studies the brownie wrapper on the table top.

“...Do you still have any issues with the homework assignment?”

He blinks, reflected in the window his turn back to him. “No, no I...I think I’m alright.”

Curtly, Togami nods into a rise, looking back over a shoulder only once to say, “I’ve no reason to stay longer, then. Goodnight.”

“...Night,” Naegi whispers, once the door’s already shut.

Tonight bleeds carmine into the frosted window panes.


	10. Chapter 10

“Just- don’t do that again, okay?” The path is crisp beneath his steps. Breath billows in fog before his mouth. “If he knew you were just pretending to be asleep, he’d probably get me expelled or something.”

Warmth floods beyond Kuwata’s straining smirk from the cigarette he huffs off. In a release of it, he laughs, one hand tucked into the pocket of his cheap windbreaker as he walks alongside him. “What was I supposed to do? Cock block ya all night?” He flicks ash off the smoke in time with his wink. “You’re welcome.”

The cold draws flush to his face the same as innuendo. Naegi scoffs, pausing as they approach up to the center campus fountain. “Well…” His words halt to twin, shakes his head and offers a look toward the horizon. They meet at the middle again to wave and part, Kuwata whistling his way off toward the girl’s dormitory. Snow lines Naegi’s path to forward faith, settled the past nights and crunching.

He flexes his fingers within their cotton. Anxiety begins only to simmer at the half minute mark alone, walking, left with thoughts pounding, sharp, fierce. He wishes he’d done more than stare at the soft tan bear face earmuffs his mother had bought him a birthday ago (congrats, you’re twenty now, here’s a six pack from dad and Rilakkuma winter gear from mommy) lain to his top closet shelf this morning, because his ears are pink and freezing now, nose too, fingertips, all void of circulation, because it’s so damn cold out here, in the tiniest excuse for a lecture hall with windows lining one side and three short steps up the center aisle to his seat.

Naegi sniffs, unravelling his scarf to rest at either side of plain heather pullover. It’s ten:fifty-nine before he looks up from his lap to the desk up front, and flinches back to find eyes already boring into him.

“Uh,” he balks, “G...Good morning, Professor…”

Togami stares, high, mighty, and only does he turn his nose away to tap a stack of papers straightened and place them back down with a slap. “Read the article I posted online. Analyze the rhetoric in an essay due next class. No talking.”

Clenching himself back, Naegi can only glance down to his lap anew, produce his laptop and set it up as a welcome barricade between them. He keeps his nose poked down behind it the whole period. Every stroke of the pen makes him tighten.

Next class, he’s told to read the article posted online, analyze it in a rhetoric essay due next class, and keep quiet.

Next class, it’s three days before Christmas, three weeks before midterm exams, and he’s told homework over break is to read the three articles posted online, compile all five thus far into six pages of analyzation due next time they meet.

“That’s a lot of work,” Naegi mumbles back to him. “I won’t really have any time to spend with my family if I’m busy doing all that…”

A book crashes to the hard oak desk top. “And what about it? Am I responsible for your poor time management skills?” Always so wise, Naegi decides to keep silent, and Togami barks on, “I feel no pity. You’re an adult, and a student. If you want to graduate, then earn it. Having perquisites handed to you on a goddamned platter is of the most pathetic forms man can take.”

Legs stretched beneath his table, Naegi frowns, pencil head bouncing over and over and over to the desk as he peers forward. All at once, acceptance finds him, folded out in a nod that Togami takes as enough to turn him back to his own work. He gets perhaps three minutes into that before interruption rolls from the tongue.

“What’re your plans for Christmas?”

Lightly, he drags his eyes up to the question, marinates a moment, and turns right back to his work.

Naegi listens to the pen scratches in the silent room. “I still have four questions leftover.”

Again, Togami offers a look, a hound two centimeters from smoked sirloin. Steel runs through his expression. To Naegi’s awful surprise, he bites. “I’m going home, spending two weeks all by myself, a _luxury,_ and then I’ll come back to work in the new year and have to deal with you again.”

“All by yourself?” Naegi shifts to kindhearted horror. He flicks a finger to his pouting lip. “...Do you like chicken?”

“No,” Togami says in immediacy, focus trained in penmanship. “Two questions remaining.”

“W-Wait!” His hands sprawl before him, though once a gaze falls to him, the heat on his face forces them inward to protect his wobbling glass heart. “Well, um...my mom makes chicken on Christmas every year. And strawberry shortcake. She’s a really good cook. Being all alone on Christmas is no fun… Do you want-?”

“No,” Togami demands. “One left.”

Unadmitted, but Naegi whines then. “Wait, these aren’t part of the game, I mean it. I...I want you to have a nice holiday. And we’re friends, right? I don’t-”

“Naegi, you must get it through that drywall skull of yours,” says the slam of a fist on the table. “We have no relationship outside of professional. I will not _hang out_ with you and your friends, your family, your _cats-_ I don’t _care._ I will not be seen with you outside of this classroom. The sooner you stop being delusional, the better life will be for the both of us.”

He stews in the reverberations a minute, sitting, wondering, then points a finger forward angled just to say, “You won’t be _seen_ with me. So if nobody sees-”

“I will expel you from this class.”

“Sorry,” he flinches, focusing back upon the pencil tapping. It ceases, next. “...You’re a lot of fun, Professor-”

“ _Naegi.”_

He ducks back down to match his lap, shivering just enough to keep a smile concealed. Terrible of him, but nothing ever comes of not trying.

And something surely comes.

Two palms hit the desk top. He watches the breath struggle into his professor’s shoulders, raising as a shadow from hell, cold, tortured, shaking his skin into a whip of the chin upward.

“You want me to acknowledge you, is that it? The little rendezvous you roped me into?”

Naegi decides there’s no shame in fright as what spills when a man twice the size, formidable in all four corners of the world, stands from behind his desk to stalk toward Naegi’s own, a panther on the hunt within which only golden eyes leer betwixt the trees. Piano music. Lava lamp light. Snow.

Togami sits upon his desk top, voice a mere feathering.

“You want me to kiss you again, like you made me do that night?” They do not touch, only in harpstring gazes. Heat kills his face. “Irresistible, really. And how foolish of me to give in to the vices of man. But you must understand one thing, where you and I differ, that’s much too great a stretch to ignore. I will risk nothing for you. You’re a handsome face, with a mind that keeps me up at night. But I will not trade my job for you.”

So close a proximity, Naegi cannot refuse his unthinking course to lift one hand and place it on the other’s atop the desk.

“Will you come for Christmas _Eve,_ at least?”

Togami stares down the flame forging their touches together. Breeze licks the outside windows.

Zero questions remaining.

* * *

“He’s my friend. He lives across the hall from me and Kuwata.”

The living room carpet is the same pale tan as it’s always been, indented from furniture legs not since moved in the last thousand moons; the fireplace, off to a far wall, crackles deep vermillions coasting up into gleaming oranges behind its grate. The wood lip up top hosts hooked stockings four down the row. It smells of mint and burn. He’s home.

Sweetest of ever, his mother’s just wonderful in her blouse and buttons and beaming joy. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Togami. You’re sure your family won’t miss you, though?”

Naegi notes the look of kerosine in his eyes. Discomfort, raveled behind courtesy. “It’s alright, my family is dead.”

As if hereditary, mother and son’s expressions both pop to shock a waning moment, until she collects herself enough to smile in some cautious little way again. “Would you like some cocoa, dear?”

In the kitchen, the smell of home quadruples, ripe with citrus and baking- the culprit is snagged from the countertop just as soon as he sees it. Lemon cookie crumbles in his mouth. He tucks his jacket up on the wall hook, this trek’s first intention, and his peek back in through the living room archway dips warmth unto his veins.

“What’re you studying?” Down the length of the sofa, his father’s turned toward their guest, in the same tinseled reindeer sweater as every Christmas Eve must present, going along in that _dad_ sort of way to twist out every detail for his curiosity. The tree shines in the low light of the room behind him.

Two seats away is where Togami’s perched himself, a mug on the coffee table before him that he’s yet to touch, though won’t refute for the sake of the sweet mother in the armchair off to the side of him. He hesitates, Naegi notices, but does permit, “Law.”

“Oh now, that’s where you make the big money,” is his father’s first praise. “You must be a smart one. Say, Togami, you like cigars?”

From the coffee table, he pulls a stout wood box, opened between them to reveal untouched rows of them. Togami spends a while studying them before selecting one in two delicate fingers for better examination. “Cuban?” he asks, to which his father laughs, “Well, they were a gift from a coworker, and he’s got relatives in _Cal-ee-forn-ee-ah.”_

Were he not so badly smiling, Naegi’s groan would seem of aversion. He rests his forehead in one hand regardless, taking to a step forward, gasping at the grip quick to squeeze his shoulder.

“Merry Christmas, butthole,” his sister so kindly greets him. She’s grinning, lemon cookie crumbs on one mouth’s corner (that, too, proving to be genetic to his own), hand relenting to allow him his freedom. “Wanna play Minecraft?”

“Yeah, college is going good, thanks for asking.” He nudges her with an elbow she swiftly deflects. In a flash, her gentle expression changes to ferocity to counterattack, though both stop and turn their noses in tandem to the howling laughter come from the other room. _Dad_ laughter.

“Wow! That’s amazing, you really know everything, huh?” their father marvels. The soft ambiance of the music from the television fades out into a new melody of an orchestra. To a prompting, “Who’s this one by?”, Togami listens a moment and nods, “Mendelssohn. A German composer. He wrote the wedding march, too, you know.”

“The one with the organs? No kidding.”

“I wish Makoto had let us meet you sooner,” his mother cuts in to croon. “You’re a delight. Cookie?”

From the angle past the doorframe, Naegi can see the softness with which Togami turns to her, written all across his face as he reaches to take a treat off the plate she offers the same way he had the cigar now lain to the table beside his mug. He bows forward, only slight, only half a moment, and still with that cascading softness says to her, “Thank you.”

Naegi could just about pass out from the shock.

“Is that your boyfriend in there?” Komaru’s chin rests on his shoulder. He can feel her smirking. “Seems like Dad likes him better than you.”

“Better than I _do,_ or better than he likes me?”

“Yep,” she replies, pushed off from her hang on him to earn, “He’s not my boyfriend, anyway. We’re just friends. ...I think.”

“ _Oooo!_ Makoto’s in _looove-”_

“Makoto? Komaru? You two in the kitchen?” Their father’s call snatches their attention, and like moths to his light, they follow past the living room threshold. “Ah, there you are. Listen to what Togami has to say abou-”

“Waaait, huh? Togami?” Komaru’s head draws back past the spine. “My friend who goes to your school told me she had a professor named Togami.”

All at once, Naegi forgets how to function. “Friend..?”

“Yeah! She said she knows you, her name’s Touko.” His sister is all smiles and good cheer. “She’s my bestie. We met when you went for orientation there in the Spring.”

“Be careful talking to people so much older than you, Komaru,” her mother warns, with a _look_ built off concern and chiding alike. Komaru tosses her wrists in the air to proclaim, “But Makoto’s that much older than me, and you _make_ me talk to him!”

From his spot on the sofa, Togami sips off his mug of hot cocoa.

Naegi could use a blood transfusion.

After a hot minute of back forth, their mother gives in to rolling her eyes the most good natured, tosses a wave to quell debate. “Well, anyhow, I’m sure you’re just confused, sweetheart. There’s no way Togami’s old enough to be a professor already, how silly!”

She laughs. Togami sips. Naegi gags on serrated relief.

“I should get going.”

“Oh, already?” The shift catches his father off guard it seems, for he appears no more than the puppy in the window who’s just been rejected by Togami’s stand up off of the couch. “Sure you don’t wanna stick around?”

“Oh, it’s alright,” mom stands to wave off. Togami fingers his cigar into his breast pocket before adjusting better his coat’s bottom. “It’s supposed to start snowing soon, wouldn’t want you to be driving in that. Take some cookies for the road, honey.”

And further do they weave into stalling, questions and good tidings passed along as Togami inches himself closer to the door, jacket tucked neat, parting gifts in hand, all the while Naegi stands to watch him go, his sister on the couch already lost on interest in his silent gazing. Togami at last is able to nod his father off of him enough to step into the threshold of the opened front door. There it is that Naegi intervenes, “Hold on- I’ll walk you out.”

He hasn’t spent the time to jaunt back for his coat or gloves, stepping bravely out onto the cold stone of the front steps as the dark star night spreads across them. Standing there on that December asphalt, Togami watches the sky glitter, whilst Naegi can watch only the chisel of the other’s profile beyond his thickened breath.

“I’m glad you agreed to come. Really glad.” Naegi waits for focus to better fall toward him, but it never does, not until he musters up the audacity to further, “I, um, got this for you. Christmas present.”

Quiet. Glittering. From within a pocket, Togami lifts his hand once, from within a pocket, Naegi produces a thin wrapped square.

“I’m sorry, I know it’s not really a _gift_ gift, and it’s kinda...lame. And that I had to wrap it using notebook paper…” A smile pokes from embarrassment. Togami examines either side of the little campus cafe gift card, 1200 yen and a friendly holiday pattern across the plastic. “I thought, maybe, when you’re sitting there on the bench, you could get a coffee or something. They have really good cinnamon rolls.”

Togami stares at the card. Naegi shuffles a boot against the ground beneath him.

There’s a long while where nothing happens, just as the world was for so long a blank canvas wherein no history lies nor fascination true, just as the world came from nothing and became something overnight, in the blink of a lash, _something_ out of nothing as they two have created now, with the door closed behind them and the cold rising still, a front porch step upon which there is no professor by the name of Togami but rather only the Togami Byakuya that exists here, a pouch of lemon cookies in his pocket and cocoa on his sweet-hating breath that Naegi can taste for however long it is that it takes to make something out of nothing, an esoteric dance that falls from the world around them to be united as only one, the pair, the one.

When he pulls back, there’s snowflakes dissolving in Togami’s hair, an endless loss of sense alit by the surrounding starlight.

“Don’t forget about your paper,” Togami says, whispers, as he pulls away enough to seperate where he’d clasped a set of their hands, leaves his lips on the high curve of the other’s cheekbone one last second before he’s gone along down the short stone steps and toward the driveway park of his Chevrolet.

Naegi places a palm to his cheek, and melts away its bare skin freeze in immediacy.

It’s Christmas Eve.


	11. Chapter 11

He’s up at nine o’clock the next Tuesday morning.

The start of each new January, where the ponds are solid and the trees don’t sway, brings him a euphoria dissimilar to the following tumbles of months that seem to drag so much as they can for the thrill of it. Now, though, in this fresh rolled new year, things are light, things are _beginning._

He hands a thick stapled bundle of papers in to his professor, and that professor is certain to make their fingers brush the finest moment.

Once he’s given his instructions (sit down, read, be quiet) he takes them gladly, perches himself in a far back row same as ever, unspins his coat and his gloves and shifts himself a dozen times in the crisp new slacks his mother had left him beneath the tree, and he sits and waits. His textbook falls open and his eyes upon its lines, though were he asked about more than the section title, he’d give a blink and a tilt and an _umm…_ that’d make him just perfectly smackable. Still, it isn’t but the first few sets of ten into the class period before his ears prick up to the sounds of papers folding back from their staple, setting to the desk, shuffling of the viewer to lean back straight in his rolling chair.

Naegi hesitates to meet the stare he knows is on him, but once he does, can only smile on one side and ask, “Was it good?”

Togami just _looks_ at him some more. He flits through the paper again to proffer better critique. “Your thesis was almost interesting, you made some rather compelling points. Like this one,” and he clears his throat to read from the second page in, “The evolution of regulations, from the very first Babylonian codes to practiced Greek and Roman law, are similar to the evolution of my Law and Literature professor over this school year. That is to say, laws have always been around, and my professor has always been very hot.” When the papers slap down to drop the barrier between them, Togami is smirking, Naegi can see, doesn’t take his eyes off him the whole time he rolls backward enough to pull from beneath his desk a bucket paper shredder, flick it on, and drop the whole stack inside it. Six pages of winter break toil slips into a hundred thousand sad little strips.

“Come here.”

A blink. Gradually, he rises, steps quietly yet swiftly toward his desk only to be halted by a palm two paces away. It switches quick to point for the doorway, a signal Naegi clamps onto to step off and check the locks behind him, no echo. He follows more that point, a cat to a laser pointer’s red, leading him along to taking a seat up atop the hard oak desk.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think over this break.”

The hands trailing to cup his either hip allude to just what those thoughts’ve entailed. Naegi burns beneath his touch.

Quick as wit as sin as whip, the hands fall away and the sultry tone fails him to lean back into lolling distaste. “Don’t think you’ve managed to _win me over_ somehow. I’ve figured that you’ll have less distractions to interfere with your work if you can stop daydreaming about having me.”

“So…” His hands rest folded in his lap, a good boy who won’t dare lock their eyes. “I have you?”

Togami purses his mouth down tight, relents enough to clench his jaw and let that too slide for a _breath._ Still, he reverberates only titanium chagrin as he moves to tug upon Naegi’s scarf. Matching their faces forward, he commands, “I told you no more questions.”

And they’re kissing again, and there’s no need to launch a parade over it, because they’re kissing with tongue and lips and passion that sears the skin a time after a time upon which it’s happened kinder and one between upon the shoulders holding certainty. He no longer must be the blushing little scholar making eyes at his teacher without ever knowing the beat of his own pulse, and it’s all begun so same as snow rolls down hill, but he needn’t be so taken with awe over these touches- it’s how it is.

Regardless, he finds himself trembling.

And further he shivers when the hand on his scarf pulls again, with a _power_ unequivocal, choking him just enough to take it for a warning, as comes along with the teeth bared in his face for hush, staid tone. “You will not speak a word of this to _anyone_ else. Not your mother, not your sister, not your idiot roommate. And, by God-”

“Not Kirigiri,” he says.

Grip upon him still, Togami loosens it just the slightest to match his forming smirk. “Good boy.”

It’s another bout of kissing, touching, all that Naegi doesn’t _need_ to be amazed by yet finds goosebumps coloring his arms all the same. The thrill of it has him in a chokehold. Never before has he been a liar, not to his mother sister idiot roommate and by God- Never before has he been able to scrape a fib off his teeth without it winding into something of such utter chaos he stuffs his tail between his legs and crawls back to the start. Though, all the same, everyday’s a lie for him, the _how ya doing_ s and the _how’ve ya been_ s, and every now and then, _do you like my haircut? how’s my breath? I didn’t make you late for any classes, did I?_ Naegi is just extraordinary with the falsehoods if feelings hang on the line. There’s feelings here, sure, the ones of despicable shaking terror should anyone find out of this silhouetted paramour. Pure logos. Don’t ask, don’t tell, by God, don’t tell.

He writhes in the adrenaline of lips on his throat.

After a clock spin he hasn’t noticed even a lick of, he’s pulling his scarf up high over the very same throat, bends to swing his bag over a shoulder and watch the ends of cuff tucking and tie straightening.

They study each other a quiet moment, profound in some other life, before Togami leans to lay his lips a half centimeter from their match. “Finish the chapter for homework,” he instructs with a stark slap to his ass.

Willing his knees not to melt from beneath him, Naegi pulls himself out the door and into the open winter wind.

By _God._


	12. Chapter 12

Thursday morning coffee has never rippled quite so much.

“-and told me all about his golfing pants. Oh, right. My dad said he wants to have your dad over to watch baseball again soon. He said he wants to give him some fancy cigars so he’ll be impressed.”

Legs folded, Kirigiri offers a glance to him, the slightest nod that houses the lightest humor he’s to taste. Her skirt’s longer today, a clean white chiffon lain past the knee that casts shadows of rounded trim edge along the cement. Naegi walks his gaze all along her body until pinching back up, taking haze, sputtering to distract, “How’s Creative Writing?”

And Kirigiri, the angel, says, “Creative.” She takes a sip from her tea cup that leaves no lipstick stain. “Law and Literature?”

No haste, Naegi puts forth in mad sputters, “Fine. Trig is getting harder, though. At least I have a lot of friends in that class, so it’s not as bad.”

Kirigiri nods again. He feels his nape darken by the second. “Must be better than being the only student in the whole course.”

“Ahah,” he laughs, and his mouth takes the cream of a vanilla pastry. “It’s fine. Do you think they’ve made any more cocoa since they told us they were out? It’s kinda been a while.”

Darken. Vanilla. Not twitching the most slight, Kirigiri keeps steady her leash round his throat, one invisible and eternal, never tugging, only keeping in line. Kirigiri keeps steady her gaze upon him. “No.” She sips her tea cup, after the soft unconcern in her voice has passed, sets it down to so idly pick the cat hairs from her glove fibers. “I’m glad you like that class so much.”

A girl skims by on the heels of her roller-wheeled sneakers. Naegi watches her go, closely, and turns back to tempt, “Hm? What class?”

“Law and L-”

“Oh, no. It’s really tough. I’m barely passing.” He looks far over one shoulder, glances to his watch that does not exist, rests his hands on the table, lifts them to stuff half a profiterole in his mouth. “I can’t wait until it’s over. Is the professor any nicer in Creative Writing?”

“Interesting that you mention the professor, of all things.”

His mouthful mumbling chokes upon itself. There’s something about the way the sunlight makes her hair shine a silver that draws her back as a phantom in the morning mist, soft and serene to guide him with palms feathering so gentle to the cheeks. There’s something about the way she’d showed him once, at his own curiosity, how to checkmate in two moves, because he hadn’t known the rules at all of chess, because he’s so delighted by how sharp her mind can prove itself and how soft her face is when they’re in her room, that makes him think he should have known better. “Uh- no, just wondering. Because, y’know, Togami is such a- a _jerk_. He makes me miserable. So many papers to write. He’s the worst.”

He knows she’ll study the hell out of how tight his jaw is, or the little bob as he swallows the cringe, so he goes off his damndest to keep them concealed from her by ducking down to scrape up some snow that’d escaped the pavilion’s shield. He knows, too, Lord, that she’ll scrawl that off on the mental note list, but the snow is soft in his hands, and he likes that. Soft in the way that brushes off with his thumb’s fanning, though never presents itself as anything besides the hard frozen center until it brushes away to soft flakes.

“Wear your scarf higher tomorrow,” she says, and brings her tea cup to her lips. “It’s cold.”

He thinks of it all the way to a Friday morning next where he’s got no class to teach til twelve and the lecture hall door is locked three times. An email through the school system had informed him he’s in danger of failing his literature course, and a meeting with his professor to discuss the matter was in order in immediacy. Naegi had read the letter through several good times, glanced across the room at Kuwata’s dark snoring figure, smirked to himself with the light of his computer screen shadowing up it, and taken off for the farthest wing from the freshmen boys’ dorms.

The discussion had began with a tug into a lap and a hand on his ass.

Very stern.

Togami kisses like a starved wolf. Naegi accepts him in all ways imaginable, flourishing with each bite to his lips and growl against his neck. He’d shopped through the back of his closet for where more motherly presents had been stashed, found a cat print turtleneck with the tags still on, and decided it’ll do best. He’s half certain it’d been a gift for Komaru before their mother realized she’d come home from the store with a size too small and improvised, but it’ll do best.

“You look so stupid,” Togami says to him as he fingers the tall collar down more to sink his teeth into the throat waiting beneath. Shivers draw his head to fall back into the palm lingering behind it.

It just about snaps his neck in such a fervor to throw him off himself when a knock drawls onto the outside door.

His pulse thumps in his trachea. Togami picks himself up into presentable in record timing, clearing his throat with two fingers to it that next point to usher him off to a desk. He slides himself into one just as the door is pulled open.

More instantly than a man’s known possible, Togami drops his mouth into a scowl.

“P-Professor-!”

“No.”

Naegi cranes his neck overhead to check what he can already fully well tell’s gone on, stomach sick in fire to spot the sunlight blinding off Fukawa Touko’s glasses lens. In both hands, she clutches onto a paper with trifold marks, spinning up those pale grays to target a former instructor. Drool glistens down the corner of her slack grin before collecting herself into pique enough to thrust the paper forward. “I f-finally figured out the horrible mistake those barbarians in the c-campus office made. I should have never been taken away from you! J-Just sign off on this, and they said they’ll put me back-”

“No.”

Fukawa blinks. Crimps form on the paper in her tightening hold. She better straightens to shout out, “Oh, you’re worried about the amount of work I’ll h-have to make up. But that’s no problem for me, you know I’m well versed enough in l-literature to-”

“No.” The door begins to swing its way closed, but from a nowhere, from a sudden burst of strength she reaches to hang white knuckles upon its edge.

Togami sneers in disgust at her.

“I know y-you’re still getting over losing me from your class, but-!”

“If you do not leave my classroom on your own, I’ll assure you do so in a body bag.”

Naegi swears he hears her moan, though watches as she shakes herself into more rigid reality to point a spindly, shaking finger at the text on the printed page. “It says-”

From those fingers, the paper is plucked, torn into two halves, and handed back.

Fukawa can only blink at the remnants. After a frozen gawking moment, she crumbles to a heap on the ground at his feet.

The abruptness drags Naegi into action, leaping from his seat to stand beside them both. “F-Fukawa?!”

The third of them scoffs exasperation. It isn’t until the door begins to shut again that life slips back into her rolled eyes; she’s on her feet again, limbs all angled to a tense bolder than he’s ever seen her, and from her swung mouth lolls the stretch of her tongue as she hollers in laughing shrill, “Hah, can’t ya fuckin’ read, assbrain?! The paper said _sign_ here, not _shred_ here! Unless you were demonstrating how you wanna crack open my legs tonight. _Ooo!_ T-Too good, let me be your never ending snow crab platter, Lovely God Byakuya!”

A thumbnail takes the brunt force of her bite as he watches red hot flush trail its way onto her face. Naegi nudges a tremorous step backward. “F...Fukawa..?

“Enough with this nonsense,” Togami rolls his eyes. “Can’t you recall that it was introducing me to your disgustingly fabricated _alternate personality_ that led me to kicking you from this class to begin with? Out. Now.”

The words, he catches, leave one eye twitching, though she carries on with zeal. “Doubt my existence all ya want, but any bozo can see I’m right here in the flesh.” Further, Naegi jumps a pace back when from beneath her swaying polyester skirt is ripped a pair of shears to point in their faces. “And _metal! Kyahahah!”_

Flinch, Togami does not, only his expression inching to change by that of her own; Fukawa drops the sinister flourish to her sneering mockery to grasp a better glimpse at the picture painted before her, one which Naegi is painfully aware of the moment she draws back to cup her face and grin. “I see what’s goin’ on- you two don’t want me here to interrupt your hot and steamy love sessions! Go on ahead, I love to choke myself out to some seme-uke rendezvousing as much as the next gal.”

Though it’s too late, and though he cannot blame pure instinct, Naegi would like to remind himself that next time a weapon is thrust into his face, sliding behind and gripping the sleeve of the man he’s so definitely _not_ having hot and steamy love sessions with is not the most keen of ideas. It’s only that he’s yet to feel so protected by another. It’s only that he quite quite quite could be quite quite quite in lo-

“He’d be my least favorite thing on Earth if you didn’t exist.” Togami tears himself away from the clutch upon his sleeve. “I’m well past sick of this. Both of you, get the hell away from me!”

How harsh he growls it sends Naegi into trepidation, but has no room to speak it with Fukawa’s mouth running so fast as her legs take the same. “Just wait until Omaru hears her brother is shacking up with his college Professor-!”

That strains him to the core, though he has no time to voice it, either, before there’s a hand at his scapula shoving him out toward the door and its slam. Naegi blinks in the empty hallway. Just as his boot lifts out before him, he’s drawn back around at the sound of the door unlatching again, a fist balling up the front of his cat print turtleneck sweater and dragging him into the hungriest messiest filthiest kiss he’s experienced yet. Wide eyed, he’s dropped back to his feet again before he can even savour the taste of coffee and ire, blinking in the empty hallway, empty, reflection awaiting beneath the tile.

He walks himself out of the building to meet the cold winter weekend.

Tension lingers thickly within.


	13. Chapter 13

Candy canes are crunchy and midterms are next week.

It only makes so much sense that when he should be studying the skin off his ass for his English exam, he’s lain to his side in the rumpled mess of his dorm room bed, chewing on peppermint, scrolling through newsfeed on his phone that won’t matter in thirty seconds. The lights are off, as they always sit, frost blue bubbling between the beds instead. It’s a sleepy six PM.

He’s had the past days and days and days and days to himself, for the most part, to his classes and to indoor guy time down the hall (because the basketball court had at last been blocked off by campus security for its black ice layer across the asphalt). Kirigiri’s hardly come knocking for him, a feat he attributes to her dedication to work. Though, most at fault for distraction from his own cannot be named in the presence of any other, and he writhes beneath his blanket covers to think on it now.

Maybe he’ll fail half his exams, but he just cannot bring himself to focus with the thought of red hot lust on his mind, the same he’s carried on within for days and days and days now despite the lapse in freedom at one encounter more archaic. He’d thought it over with after the interruption of voyeurism and scissor blades a time gone past, though Togami had simply decided that classroom meetings were out of the question, now, along with the rest of the world where eyes should fall. But they’d made it work- in the bathroom stall, in the textbook closet, in the front seats of his car with the moon shining overtop (magic- that’d been just plain magic), in his very own goddamned bed when he knows Kuwata’s gone to toke it down the hall and forgotten his room key on the nightstand. That’d been once, only once, with a half hour of convincing to push it forth, and he’d been halfway undressed with light streaming so gently on his bare chest and the softest of moans tempting his lips when the banging at the door and the _lemme in, Naegs, I forgot my key again!_ had split them. How despicable his luck. Recalling it now, the way Togami had been so near him, the way he hadn’t been Togami at all but only his lush and sensitive man, his Byakuya, the way he’d kissed him without grief, moonlight coming to tint off his cheeks, the way Togami Byakuya had touched him and marked him and made him all _his_ only his for now for ever for always, in his own goddamned dorm room bed, had taught him the meaning of bliss.

He’s got his fingers just beneath the waistline of his underwear once the doorknob slams to the inside wall.

“Remembered my key this time!”

The violence with which he’s ripped his hands to clutch the top of his blanket prove the statement wrong, because Kuwata hasn’t seen a thing besides his hot taunted face. He grins like a dog. “Hah- do I know that look. Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead, dude, I’ll put my headphones in.”

Naegi _burns._ Kuwata flops himself on his own bed to face the wall, Naegi unclenching his expression at last to slip himself out from underneath the covers. Socks meet boots, sweatshirt pulled over head. “I’m going for a walk,” he announces, though the ears that take them are plugged in corded music already as promised, leaves him to shake his way out the door and face the night.

It’s snowing tonight, not enough to make him wish for better insulation, only enough to ease the mortification tarnishing his soul the few several meters trekked. Hands in the pockets, head ducked low, he trails in caution, hardly wishing footprints left behind. The quiet stillness of the air leads him forward toward the center of campus. Thin solid frost coats the top of the commons fountain. He watches it, interested, silent, before picking his gaze up to face the dorms just across. First a breath, then, a step.

“Hi Naegi!”

Quick is that greeting to come- though not without burden. He’s standing at the tip of the second floor, where Asahina catches first sight of him among the mild catastrophe stretching across the hall. She shoves a box into his arms to bend down for one spilled by her feet. He shifts his hold as he watches her push stuffed bunnies back into their crate. “Hi, Asahina. ...What’re you guys up to?”

The _guys_ of it follow out into the hall to see him, Kirigiri first in her silent padding. Soon to follow dances Maizono, and he’s just gaga for her dressed down to a tee shirt and tiny shorts, silk locks pinned up lazy atop her head and still cascading some over the grooves of her shoulders. In close to practiced sync, Asahina piles another box atop his first one as Kirigiri forces his superglued attention elsewhere by the cheek.

“I’m moving into Kyouko’s room,” Asahina answers, directing him toward it to drop his cargo. “Koizumi okay’d it since my other roommate got expelled or whatever. I don’t wanna be all alone here every night- it’s creepy!”

He grunts as he unbends, processing her answer in blinks. “Wait, huh? Expelled? What happened?”

The unspoken breaktime arranges itself with Kirigiri placing herself atop her made bed, Asahina standing solid to face him with a pout. “Dunno, I heard she threatened a teacher with scissors or something. She was totally weird, anyway, so I don’t mind. I don’t think she took a shower the whole time she was here.”

Frozen as the outside wind, Naegi could just about collapse in on himself, were it not for the soft pad of socked steps, drop of a box and dainty huffing to follow. Maizono rests her hands to her hips. “There’s just a couple more things left in your old room. We made really good progress!” Sharing grins, she taps a high five to Asahina before sitting hip to hip beside Kirigiri. “It’s gonna be so much fun for you guys to live together.”

Smiling still, Asahina nods to her. “Thanks so much for helping me move. You should stay over tonight, Sayaka! That’ll make it even more fun.”

“A sleepover?” she laughs, too charming to be of this world. One foot lifts to nudge Naegi in one shin. “No boys allowed, then.”

Glass shatters down his throat. He laughs it away. “Right. I should get going anyway, ah- bye, have fun tonight.”

Asahina’s already begun climbing the ladder to the top bunk as she joins into waving him goodbye. When he catches Kirigiri’s eye, only flat interest shines back. He refuses it, timidly, and decides that running into oncoming traffic might make a good major, because the hallway is dark and he’s flush from the run back across campus, and his pockets are empty of desire when he pats them down.

Ah. It’s on the nightstand.

He pounds the door for a full minute before he’s reminded into dropping only his forehead to the wood ( _hard_ ) that, go ahead, dude, he’ll put his headphones in.

The semester’s going great, really- that’s what he’s thinking as he pounds the stairs back down again, fingers bumbling with his half dead phone the whole way to elbowing out the lobby doors into the darkening evening. Snow falls thrice as hard at this point now, the rationale behind taking such haste to get back to his dorm the last jaunt. Copying it backward had crossed his mind, sure, but, hah, no boys allowed. How perfect.

He doesn’t quite care to press the cell phone screen to his cold cold cheek as he does now, because this number was given for the most strict of emergencies only, and only if those emergencies occur between six AM and six PM. Perhaps being locked out of his dorm room is a good enough emergency to warrant sweet sympathy, perhaps not.

“ _You’re an absolute idiot,”_ answers his plea. _“...Walk to the smoothie place outside campus. Be careful.”_

Naegi nods, pockets the dead line with his hands, and breathes fog out upon his path. Nothing excites him about the idea, being it a twenty minute hike from his standing point to the cut off to the outside world. Tempt comes to peel off the layers midway through the walk, where he’s wet beneath the bangs and stiff at every last rustle of the shadows. By the time he’s dragged himself to his destination, the Chevrolet’s already pouring exhaust out its back end in the parking lot. Waiting.

The interior smears heat even more so to his skin, snow melting from coat sleeves and hair and fever before he’s even got the passenger side door thumped shut. Fingers thrum their way down the steering wheel. Togami adjusts the rear view mirror the most subtle fraction.

“...Would you like a smoothie.”

It cannot even be categorized as a question with such nonexistent inflection. And it catches him off guard to hear it either way, eyes moving from the other’s straightlaced stare forward and the lit up window walls of the building before them. Smile working onto his lips, Naegi shakes his head. “No, thanks. I’m kinda cold.”

“You must be,” murmurs Togami as he shifts into reverse to guide them out for the streetway. “That’s no way to dress for walking a half mile in a blizzard.”

“Sorry.” Naegi’s still smirking in his window reflection. “I wasn’t really planning on doing any of that.”

Being encapsulated within this upholstery again, dark smokey leather, reminds him of the touches spread across it, smelling of gold and glory, the hands on his face and the love on his breath- his breath, their breath, their lives melting into one that the lighter holds hotter to now as they pull up to a driveway most foreign. Naegi looks out upon the lot ahead of him, and his irises gleam with pristinity.

“Your house is really... _big.”_

He’s shaking snow from his hair another time once they’ve reached the foyer. To the comment bounces only, “Take your boots off.”

Across the stout little walk in, he nods, coat already left upon the rack, stumbling over himself to peel his shoes off in time to follow the other’s already vanishing form. Ice drips off him several paces into the kitchen. All the while, he’s so absorbed in absorbing every last detail of the fine fine myriad that he hardly hears himself be asked, “Have you eaten?”

Pursing the lips to thought, Naegi decides finally to shake his head, to which an eyeroll is received back. The refrigerator suctions itself open. Togami gestures toward it. Naegi keeps his head low, approaching submissively in this place of no gods he knows. “Um…” he drawls after a while of staring inside the shelves. “Do you have cup ramen?”

Somehow, he survives past the question long enough to be ordered into a breakfast table seat to wait for the bowl set before him half an hour post. He pokes his nose over the steam, and he smiles. “Sukiyaki.”

“Something to keep you warm,” Togami explains, then sits across him at the table made for two. No time is wasted before Naegi’s got chopsticks lifted up to stuff his cheek.

“You aren’t having anything?” he questions once he stops for a breather ten mouthfuls later to realize he’s only being observed, leisure written in the lean across from him, in the shake of the head that answers. He circles his bowl with the utensils a moment, shyly removing his gaze over sidelong. His face glows. “Sitting like this having dinner...it’s almost like we’re on a date.”

Hardly does Togami move to reply. They exchange fleeting looks, Naegi smiling in such a demure kind of starshine as he dips his head back down for another mouthful of noodles.

Dinner ends with a point up the stairs. “There’s guest rooms down the left side of the hallway. Take your pick.”

Though the most mild anticlimax throbs in his chest, he nods, watches sleeves roll up elbows and faucet knobs twist, and his offer to help with the dishes is shooed off in harsh command that assures him not a second try. He finds his way toward the staircase, climbing them one at a slow, kind time, until he’s facing the ornate corridor of Togami Byakuya’s upstairs. Two doors line the left of his sight, two down the right. To one immediate side, there’s a window from which he watches the storm flood the blackened sky, entranced a while before stepping his way down toward the closed doors.

It almost scares him to be alone up here, a place he’s never seen, all void of light and life. He half expects something to jump out at him when he nudges the first door open- nothing does, neither fright nor comfort, even, so he moves on to checking the next few rooms until he’s found just the one he likes. One that smells of gold and glory and Burberry cologne.

Care lines his movements toward the California king centerpiece, blanketed by a thick white bedspread of untouched quality. A round mirror rests hooked to one wall, another even larger screwed into his dresser set. In front of it sits a neat row of bottles, combs, sprays, beside the door to the en suite bathroom that houses even more. His fingers run softly along the dustless wood of his bureau’s lip.

“Tell me how I knew I’d find you in here.”

He jumps. A turn over one shoulder brings the other to life, the intruder where he himself plays the same, leant to the doorframe with arms crossed and face unconcerned. Naegi pulls his hands back for himself, grinning some melody of sheepish strain to ease whatever malice should come. Rather, Togami pads quiet as a cat along the carpet toward him. A palm finds his face. It’s freezing, but the press of lips upon his plays a warm enough compensation.

Naegi does not move once the kiss breaks, twisting only to watch his prowl over toward the right hemisphere of the bed to place himself. Meticulous, that’s the routine Naegi examines, with the way Togami unlatches his Rolex and lays it in his nightstand drawer, shuts it to go to work on his cuffs, shirt buttons, belt, until he’s dressed down to his underclothes. Back facing his guest, his smoked veneer of a voice out lets, “It’d be entirely inappropriate for you to share my bed tonight.”

After a wince, Naegi nods, ready to turn back to the left side hall until the blanket flips back and Togami’s staring him down with half moon eyes. A delectable fate for him to crawl within. He slips himself from his jeans and pulls the comforter close up around his body. Togami does not hint around the swift motion of claiming him, presses his front to Naegi’s back and curls his arm over him. Breath tickles his hair.

“Thank you for picking me up. And for dinner, and everything else.” He nestles himself more perfect into the hold around him. “I really appreciate you.”

They shift about a bit. Lips press to his jawline. Nibbling. “You slept at Kirigiri’s dorm tonight.”

Very nearly does he protest the oddity before finding it in him to understand. Fine enough a solution to placate future hounding. In an exhale from the nose, a close of the eyes, he allows his skin be ravished in kisses, slow warm kisses all down his jaw and neck. A hot interval passes before the looming presence grows restless, mouth to mouth hand to shoulder to pull him to his back, climb atop him, feel him. Naegi’s tight to think on the fact that there’s no one here to interrupt them now. It’ll happen so long as he keeps his mouth shut. Nearly is it too delectable an idea to exist. His toes curl under the blankets. A hand lifts his shirt by the bottom hem. It.

Magic- just plain ever loving _magic._ Togami asks in his pauses every so often, always to which Naegi will nod his flushed face and force himself to meet his gaze, deciding after a time or so to reach forth and take the glasses off his nose, fold them as they kiss again. They’re taken right back to be placed beside the table lamp, never ebbing away enough to lose the moment; Togami pauses, and then they’re nude, sculptures of clay by God’s own hand, stripped down beneath the covers for flesh on flesh everywhere it can get. For a while, they just lie there like that, flat together and unholy, Togami with his hands cupping Naegi’s face as he kisses him and is kissed back just as strongly. He moves his tongue so slowly along the other’s it makes his whole form ache. For a while, they just lie there. And then they don’t, until they do again, sweating and breathless and awful and enthralled. Somewhere in his head, had he the blood supply enough up there right now, Naegi would shriek. Instead he allows himself, after some time in quiet, to be brought back into the same position as before, back to his front front to his back, naked, pure.

Togami kisses behind his ear, and Naegi would die right there if he didn’t have class in the morning.

“I don’t know what you’ve done to me,” husks against his skin. “I can’t figure it out.”

The light from the window shines a patch on the floor down further the room. Naegi fights the weight of his eyelids if only to watch the snow outside, breath falling in time to its drift. For his fatigue, he attempts to figure a good response, scraps over several in his mind until deciding. “I’ve loved you,” he says, and he wouldn’t have if it weren’t January, or if they weren’t wrapped together this way, or if he hadn’t locked himself from his room or if he hadn’t woken eleven minutes after his alarm.

Breaths roll against his ear, and the last thing he sees is the snow outside the window panes.


	14. Chapter 14

“Well if you were as smart as me, that shit wouldn’t happen.”

To his name he’s got only the clothing upon him, parked just outside the threshold of their door with a freshly awoken hate-hearted roommate the only barrier between the room and the hall. Sunlight borders his broad shoulders. Head hung, Naegi presses his palms together. “Kuwata, _please-”_

“Nah, I’m just messing with ya.” Suddenly, the gruffness that’s faced him the last minute fades off into a grin. “I’ve been up for half an hour.”

Blinking, he slowly raises his head to peer at him, hands dropping rather to clench before himself. “Um- sure, right. Sorry, still, I just have English in ten minutes and I need to grab my books.”

An inward flailed arm guides him, _right this way,_ to which his sigh is of relief now as he beams his way forth toward his bed. Out of perfect discipline, he does not dare look the other’s way, because he knows it’s coming, and he knows his face will be a readable as the textbook in his hands.

“Where’d you end up staying last ni-?”

“Kirigiri’s.” The flash immediacy would perhaps alert any other’s suspicion, though Kuwata, Naegi knows, will only accept, only crack some nasty joke, move on with his day. That’d be Kuwata alone, not that of the voice so sudden enough to clench all his muscles emerging from nowhere.

“Huh? No you didn’t, Naegi, remember me and Asahina slept there last night?” Need not he turn around to know true fear. Maizono Sayaka steps out from the lodging of herself behind Kuwata and the opened room door, hidden within the second closet of the room storing trinkets and nothings along its shelf. She’s hefting a box up in her arms, struggling not the slightest with her practiced dancer’s strength, to toss upon the second bed of the room storing messy sheets and now, a box, to which she’s tossed various trinkets and nothings into. Pretty pink acrylics clasp around a picture frame that leaves her grinning cheeky. “Aw, you used to be kinda cute, Kuwata. I like a natural blond.”

“Would you quit rifling through my shit already?” His hand swings out to snatch the picture from her, tossing it back behind a shoulder onto the closet shelf with a _thunk._ “Anyway- _yeesh -_ what’s this about you and that other chick having a sexy sleepover at Kirigiri’s? Naegi, goddamn it. You were in on that, and you didn’t invite me?”

Knuckles slap against his bicep. “Leave him alone, he wasn’t even there.” All the sudden, her expression condenses into slyness. “So, where _weeere_ you then?”

Long enough passes for him to feel safe with himself to twist around and face the question, the looks of them both upon him awaiting response. _Looks._

“I...I-uh...I-I went home. My mom came and got me.” Naegi nods. Yes, right.

Maizono pops her mouth.

“Alright, if you won’t tell me, I’ll just ask Sonia. She gets _all_ the gossip in the girls’ dorms.”

In a mild panic, Naegi freezes, though relaxes at common sense bargaining. He’ll evade the sway of catty girl canards. He’d been nowhere in sight. So long as Sonia Nevermind hadn’t been craving a strawberry smoothie in the middle of a snowstorm last night, he’ll make it through unscathed.

“No, no,” wags Kuwata’s finger. “I know where he was. Gettin’ a little extra study time with tall blond professor guy, eh?”

So long as Kuwata Leon turns up dead in a ditch the next morn, he’ll make it.

“N-No way! I-”

“Oh, my God! Naegi, you have a crush on your professor?!” Maizono’s laughing so sweet, yet still does it carry its venom to his veins. Next, she gasps behind one hand. “Oh, my God. You mean that guy who teaches reading classes? Ibuki has him for Gothic Lit. She says he’d be totally hot if he weren’t so thin.”

“Uh, he’s-he’s okay,” Naegi stammers, and he knows it’s over beyond over once he feels his face heat up this plenty. Giggles burst out from Maizono’s lips.

“You totally have a crush on him, that’s so cute!” She claps her hands together just once. “Is that really where you were last night? Did you have a date? How romantic was it? Oo, is he a good kisser?”

“He a good fuck?” Kuwata barks. “Bet he must be, with legs like that.”

Where they both take to staring at him, he blinks back betwixt the two of them, and straightens. “Hey, there’s nothing more sexy to women than a man who’s secure enough to compliment another man’s physique.”

“Right, keep telling yourself that.” Maizono pushes herself forward past him to better address the third. “I’m so happy for you, Naegi. I felt bad for making you leave last night, but Kyouko said she knew you had somewhere to go. This is _literally_ the cutest thing ever- my future sight is certain of it.”

“Um…” He’s claimed so much heat now he could sweat. It’s decided, that for the betterment of the situation, of weaving his way from the dirty lie he’d pledged, that there’s light far ahead of this exertion, so long as the other of its concern never ever should hear of it. He’ll make it. “Yeah, we had a nice time last night.”

With a surplus of glee, she waves into claps and beaming. “Cute! ...Oh, jeez, you’ll probably have to keep this kind of thing a secret though. I used to know a girl who dated her science teacher, and he ended up getting fired. Like, super fired, where no other school will hire you either. I mean, he _was_ sixty-seven and married, but…”

Finger to her lips, eyes drifting to the ceiling- she nods off into thought. The idea stirs his insides to mush. His love has never a diabolic side.

“Nah, don’t worry about that. As long as you’re legal, I think it’s just frowned upon. The school board has nothin’ on either of you.” Kuwata pats his arm in one rough whap. “Teacher fuck to your heart’s content.”

The words ring _comforting,_  in some stupid sickly sort of style, leaving him to shoulder his bag and wave himself off into the world, tested and true of the settling chill around him. It’s like ice skating, the way he floats across campus concrete. What with the ice, the cold, the lightness in his chest. Admitting to the one secret he’s ever had to for so long hole away makes him feel...new. Not freed, not weightless, but _new,_ as if he’s got a path paved ahead of him he’s yet to see, and with more gradual chipping, it’ll be clear enough to sprint down. There’s trial, but he’s got a strong jury.

There’s negative four minutes to English class when his phone vibrates on one hip.

 _“Makoto, were the sheets on your bed washed with fabric_ _softener?”_

His steps halt beside an empty bench, glancing around at the empty nothing of the open morning campus. Seemingly, his breath could echo. “I have to go to class, Komaru. I don’t really have time to talk about my bedsheets right now, sorry.”

 _“Wait!”_ calls him back to where he’s never left. _“I need to know, because my friend is gonna be staying here for a while and she’s sleeping in your bed and she has sensitive skin! It’s really really important!”_

Naegi blinks his eyes shut, fog from the nose in a deep exhale. Then, all at once, he snaps back to life. “...Please tell me you aren’t talking about Fu-“

_“She got kicked out of college, Makoto, she has nowhere to go right now!”_

Fingers pinch the top bridge of his nose. “...No, I don’t think Mom used fabric softener. Make sure she doesn’t do anything weird to my room, okay, please? She already doesn’t like me very much…”

_“Well, it wasn’t very nice of you to start dating her boyfriend, Makoto, I wouldn’t be very happy if you did that to me.”_

He _gags_. “I- what?! I didn’t- T-Togami was never her b-”

 _“Huh?! Huh?!”_ her voice pierces his eardrum. _“Wait, I’m lost now. THAT’S the guy you two are dating? But I thought he was just your friend? Wait hold on, what’d you say, Touko?”_ The line pauses silent a moment, where he hones in upon the whispers spat muffled off, until his sister shrills a gasped out, “ _Your professor?! Makoto, you’re dating your-!”_

“It’s complicated!” Frantic jolts squeeze his fists. “Just-Just don’t worry about it, Komaru- I didn’t steal anybody’s boyfriend, me and Togami are just really good friends.”

 _“R-Really good friends don’t b-brainwash each other into homoerotica!”_ he hears on the other end. Twelve minutes past the English bell. Komaru, by the shuffling sounds, cups a hand over the receiver to address him. _“Well, I think I should go, Mom wants me to help fold some laundry. See you whenever you come home again!”_

“Wait, Komaru- _Komaru!_ Don’t tell-!” In his palm, the call clicks dead. The phone drops to draw his weary sight over it, sighing out his plea’s end. “...Mom.”

It’s sixteen minutes past curfew in his morning class as his phone sits buzzing in his palm all over again.

_“Makoto, your sister just told me-”_

“She’s lying,” he spits. The bench beside him still rests emptied. Not another breath passes the horizon. “Or-Or she’s just confused. I’m not dating my professor, Mom, I _promise,_ he’s just a really nice guy, and-”

 _“Huh, what now about dating your professor?”_ his mother cuts in atop molten concern. _“She told me you thought your sheets weren’t washed with fabric softener. I wanted you to know that I always used some. I know you like your blankets extra soft, sweetheart, but- what? Are you talking about your friend you had over for Christmas?”_

“I…” Were his foot any deeper in his mouth he’d taste thigh. He wets his lips, then all in one rush spills, “I’ve got to go to class, Mom, love you, bye!”

He pockets penitence along with his phone. It isn’t that he’s wanted to hang up on his mother, just that that admittance that’s drizzled him in sugar now burns at every corner- too much dropped all at once, it’s in his eyes, in his wounds. No longer does he feel so new as he does writhe within idiocy.

Evidently, that’s written all over his face.

“What have you done now.” There he’s gone again, not inquiring with his inquiries but simply tugging the answers he desires out in one sharp pull, scarves from the mouth of a jester. Naegi very well may be donning a hat of four points as he steps up to the king’s throne before him behind the hard oak desk. It’s the only place he’s thought up that could bring him solace now where he fumbles, heart enough to bruise his ribs now. He swallows. The marks on his neck have faded without the winter sun to highlight them. His hands wring their sweat at the front of his waist.

“Are you busy? Maybe we can get lunch.” His head tilting smile should work wonders to delight him, he’d hope to think. Togami does not take his eyes off of his scrawling pen ink.

“It’s ten:thirty.”

“...Brunch?”

“What do you want, Naegi?” he digs at last. Pen tip aims toward the door as he says, “I’ve got work to do. If all you’d like to do is stand there and look guilty, do so elsewhere.”

Messy, yet he persists, “No, ah, really! I...miss you, Byakuya.”

That captures his attention. Wondrously. With a darkened look in his eye, he sets his work aside to rather call forth the other toward him. Naegi is nothing but dainty in a seat atop the other’s lap.

Kisses work their way to his cheek, voice deep around, “You’ve missed me already, hm? Was I truly so unforgettable?”

Naegi _relaxes_ into that tone, syrup over his hotcakes, butter on his toast, and allows himself be squeezed round the middle and kissed across the face. From nowhere, everywhere, he decides upon folding himself inward, burrowing his face to disappearance within his cologne scented shoulder. His breaths are deep, solid, and the rubbing up and down his back a soothe, and he could just about fall asleep like that were it not for the nerves nibbling his insides.

“I don’t want you to get fired,” floats soft and sudden into the heat of his neck. “I think you’re a really good teacher.”

He can feel Togami retract back, peel forth a sideways leer. “What have you done now.”

He’d... _laugh,_ but usually it’s those who do so before the judge being shipped off to the chair. Perhaps that’s an inevitable outcome to truth here, though he supposes good grinds evil into dust most often, and truth is good and lies are bad, just like his parents have taught him since elementary, huh, yeah? His palm brushes down all the buttons of his horrible wonderful professor’s shirt.

“K...Kirigiri told our friend Maizono, and then Maizono told Kuwata, and at the same time Fukawa told my sister and my sister told my mom- or, well, maybe I told my mom, and I also kinda told Maizono and Kuwata, but that was after they’d already figured it out, and- and- I didn’t even _hint_ at anything to Kirigiri, she’s just a forensics major. She’s been a forensics major since we were like, eleven, I think. It’s-It’s crazy.” Finally, he allows his time to swallow and catch lungs up to tongue. “So...So, _really,_ I didn’t do anything, it was everybody else who did everything. But- it’s okay! Nobody else is gonna find out. And nothing bad is gonna happen- you aren’t married, right?”

As he’s expected, once the ten second tirade closes out, no reply graces it a while. It’s just so _awkward_ sitting there in limbo awaiting something, and twice so sitting on his lap to do it- Naegi limbers to his feet to lean back against the desk drawers, hands restless, vision narrowing. At last, Togami shifts, Naegi flinching in expected backfire, though only does he spare the motion to cross one leg over the other, rest his cheek on one fist.

“Alright,” he says, to which Naegi’s eyeballs have no home for a moment.

“It...i-it is?”

Tempted, Togami’s mouth curves a smirk. “You sincerely thought I’d have any faith in you keeping this to yourself? My God, you’re practically transparent. I can take a glance at you and tell what you‘ve had for dinner every night this week.” His chair swivels to better face him straight on. “This isn’t to say I no longer care about the matter, only that I’ve anticipated it and have enough experience with having students expelled by now that I know it’ll take one flick of my finger in your direction to have the blame relieved from myself entirely.”

“Huh?” he balks. “You’d...You’d blame everything on me if we got in trouble?”

Shortly, a flame, Togami shrugs the shoulders. “I don’t daydream about it.” Somewhere behind lakes of steel blue, there’s a tenderness Naegi can catch only in times where they’re alone and the windows are tinted with sun and everything feels taut. “Not everything. Don’t be dramatic. And I foresee nothing of the sort, if we continue on so careful as we’ve been.”

The reflection in the far wall windows blinks back at him, dying off quickly to melting tone; “Naegi. Look at me.”

When he does, he wishes he hadn’t, for it’d be better than etching into his eyes the look of saltwater and orange evenings, teasing tides upon bare ankles, fireworks, magic. Togami isn’t who he’s been, who he was or ever will be, Naegi knows, and Naegi knows he has a million more layer to unravel of him after the million he’s already lifted, and just perhaps he was expecting fury to face confession because that’s all he’s ever known of this Togami Byakuya, and perhaps he’d rather it. But- but this Togami Byakuya reaches with gentle hands of primrose, and this Naegi Makoto who neither is unchanging but entirely the strand upon which the sea laps, steps forward to grasp both those hands in his own, look into his eyes, and read all the hundreds and hundreds of promises inside them. The hope inside them. Naegi can feel it with the squeeze that meets his either palm.

“...Let’s go to brunch,” Togami says, and Naegi, for all his snap tease fret he’s been, feels himself smile just the shortest bit.

And further does it stretch when, over plates of pancakes, meat, rice, milk, a butter knife directs toward him, in their secluded little corner of the farthest cafe off campus before toeing over a new prefracture, Togami whispers to him, “I’m only saying things like that to smarten you up, you must know.”

In a tilt of his head, Naegi smirks bright and beautiful at him, snatches up the knife from his hand to smear jam across a slice of toast. Silverware clinks to porcelain across from him where he does not watch. A short skirted waitress tips herself forward three tables away to serve coffee to a diner. Naegi spares it only a half second glance before turning back to stuff rice in his mouth.

Over the tablecloth, he lets his hand reach to rest atop Togami’s knuckles.

Their eyes meet in the center. For all he’s got within him, the simper dancing through swimming blue irises melts Naegi just the same as any touch. Magic. Just plain magic.


	15. Chapter 15

“You have one hour and thirty minutes to complete your test. Communication of any kind will result in a void of your results and an automatic zero. No devices or outside help. You may ask me questions, but it isn’t encouraged.” A thick booklet slaps to the bare wood of his desk. “Good luck.”

Sunlight streams on his early morning face. Several rows back, three steps up, Naegi adjusts himself to press graphite to the front page. Naegi Makoto. Law and Literature. 29 January.

He works close to religiously for a good twenty two minutes until he flips several pages to questions pertaining to ten chapters ago. His eraser taps quietly to the desk. The intertwinement of philosophy and law is where he shines another section later, recalling as well the back and forth regime that takes place within trials and called for acceptances among unequivocal evidences. The bonus question at the end, too, scrawled quick and neat in a manuscript he’s only ever read in scathing red, he thinks he knows the answer.

_+1 Point. Hottest professor on campus._

His laughter sparks a clear of the throat from the front of the room, eyebrows lifted at him in perfect stern to duck his head back down toward his exam. After a second’s contemplation, he drags his pencil through the letters _you, sweetheart,_ folds the booklet closed and stands to pass in it up front.

“Adequate work, my student,” his professor commends after a quick flip through. Naegi poses there with his hands in his pockets as he scans through several pages of question work. Once it drops, and they face each other, Togami says merely, “Tell your mother thank you for the mittens she sent me.”

Nodding, Naegi laughs, fingers loose around the straps of his bag. His smile persists the whole while he looks to him. “I hope I did good on that. Maybe we should have a tutor session, anyway, just in case. Like, this Friday, while Kuwata and Hagakure take me out for pre-birthday drinking. Maybe we can study together then. Oh- and afterward, when Kuwata’s passed out drunk on Maizono’s floor, and I have my room all to myself.” His smirking hurts him to repress. “I think we’ll get a lot of studying done then, really.”

Forward, Togami leans, glasses tipped down his nose to scrutinize over. With a shake of the head, he brings himself back, pushes them to place, drops his arms to a fold. “I can’t stand you, Makoto.”

Naegi bows forward that simper at last, plucks upward again to bare a grin too kind to live on.

The door handle plunges in the grasp of his palm to allow him his exit once bags have been shouldered and papers collected. Each step is loose, free, new, ambling across campus toward the rushing water of the centerpiece fountain, benches around taking hold of stragglers relishing in the euphoria of a warm morning. He feels quite lightened to be over with the majority of his exams, now, rounding out the last tomorrow with no worries to cater to. Delicious, stretching his arms, tendons, delightful.

He feels quite breathless to be taking those steps, steps, steps with life brushing his one side, as well. Up his eyes trail to glance to him, Togami’s face that remains stoic, keeping his distance as minimal as possible before question could be raised by wandering wonders. Naegi looks to him, and for a split second, Togami looks back, keeping in perfect step with him the whole way as they walk together along morning sun brightness.

How wonderful a quiet emotion.


End file.
